Memo Found in Hamas Bunker and Intercepted Communications Reveal Oct. 7 Attack's Brutal Plan
A memo by Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar and intercepted calls reveal a pre-meditated plan for the Oct. 7 attack, ordering fighters to target civilians.

ERBIL (Kurdistan24) - A chilling six-page handwritten memo, believed by Israeli intelligence to have been penned by the powerful Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, has provided the most explicit evidence to date that the horrific violence unleashed against civilians during the October 7, 2023, attack was not a spontaneous act of brutality but a pre-meditated and core component of the assault's design.
The document, discovered in an underground Hamas complex and now detailed in a comprehensive report by The New York Times, called for fighters to target not only soldiers but also civilian communities, and explicitly instructed them to set entire neighborhoods on fire and to broadcast the violent acts in order to sow fear and destabilize Israel.
This directive from the highest echelons of Hamas was echoed in a series of previously unreported, real-time communications intercepted by Israeli intelligence on the day of the attack, in which Hamas commanders can be heard giving their subordinates stark and brutal orders: "Start setting homes on fire," "Kill everyone on the road," and "Slit their throats."
The discovery of the memo and the analysis of the intercepted communications provide a granular and deeply disturbing new understanding of the planning and execution of the October 7 attack, which shattered Israel's sense of security and plunged the region into a devastating two-year war.
The memo was found by a special Israeli military unit in May 2025, after the assassination of Muhammed Sinwar, a top Hamas commander and the brother of Yahya Sinwar. According to The New York Times, which obtained a copy of the document, the unit entered an underground complex that Muhammed Sinwar had used and discovered a computer that was not connected to any network, making it much harder to access through remote spying.
On this "air-gapped" computer, they found an image of the six-page memo.
Dated August 24, 2022, nearly 14 months before the attack, the memo appears to be a direct order from Yahya Sinwar, laying out instructions for the assault. Seven Israeli officials who spoke to The New York Times confirmed their belief that the document was authored by the powerful Hamas leader, who was himself killed by Israeli forces in October 2024.
Sima Ankona, a former document examination expert in the Israeli police who was consulted by The Times, stated that the handwriting in the memo matches other known samples from Yahya Sinwar, including a note he wrote to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 2018.
The memo's contents directly contradict the public claims made by Hamas's leadership, who have often sought to portray the violence against civilians as an unintended consequence of the operation. The Israeli officials who spoke to The New York Times assert that the document shows that Sinwar wanted his fighters to target civilians from the very outset.
While the memo does not explicitly use the words "kidnap or kill civilians," its instructions leave little room for ambiguity. It lays out clear orders for fighters to enter residential neighborhoods and set them on fire "with gasoline or diesel from a tanker." The directive is chillingly specific: “Two or three operations, in which an entire neighborhood, kibbutz, or something similar will be burned, must be prepared,” the memo said.
The intercepted communications from the day of the attack, which were collected by the Israeli military's elite signals intelligence unit, Unit 8200, and shared with The New York Times, reveal how these top-down orders were translated into real-time commands on the battlefield.
Just before 10 a.m. on October 7, a commander from a Gaza City battalion, identified as Abu Muhammed, can be heard telling his subordinates, “Start setting homes on fire.” He repeats the command with visceral urgency: “Burn, burn. I want the whole kibbutz to be in flames.”
Around the same time, another commander in the northern Gaza city of Jabaliya, identified as Abu al-Abed, gives a similar, sweeping order: “Set fire to anything.”
These materials, which also include hours of previously unreported communications between commanders and eight different groups of fighters, have been the subject of intense study within the Israeli intelligence community as it grapples with the catastrophic failures that allowed the attack to succeed.
The Gazit Institute, a think tank affiliated with the Israeli military intelligence directorate, prepared a confidential report on the memo and the intercepts, which was also reviewed by The New York Times. The report concluded that the “Hamas leadership planned and carried out an attack that featured acts of ‘extraordinary brutality.’” The report further stated that “Its aim was to cause great turmoil in the country and the military.”
The memo and the intercepts also provide a more detailed understanding of the specific tactics that were planned and executed. The memo outlined a plan for a surprise attack that would use bulldozers to create openings in the heavily fortified fence separating Gaza and Israel, followed by multiple waves of attackers.
It expressed a clear desire for the acts of violence to have a high shock value, with instructions to "Stomp on the heads of soldiers," "opening fire on soldiers at point-blank range, slaughtering some of them with knives, blowing up tanks.”
Again, the intercepted communications from October 7 show these orders being carried out with brutal precision. “Slit their throats,” a commander from a battalion in northern Gaza told his team. “Slit them as you are trained.”
The commanders also broadly called for indiscriminate violence and the taking of captives. When one militant asked if he should confront people on the road, a commander from a Jabaliya battalion, identified as Abu Muath, responded with a chillingly simple command: “Kill everyone on the road. Kill everyone you encounter.”
The same commander later urged his fighters, "Guys, take a lot of hostages. Take a lot of hostages.”
A central and critical component of the plan, as laid out in the memo, was the weaponization of the violence itself through media. The document explicitly called for the acts of brutality to be filmed and broadcast to the Arab world in order to mobilize people outside of Gaza to join the fight.
The plan envisioned that Palestinians in the West Bank, Arab citizens of Israel, and the broader Arab and Muslim "nation" would "respond positively to calls for them to join the revolution." The memo is unequivocal on this point: “It needs to be affirmed to the unit commanders to undertake these actions intentionally, film them and broadcast images of them as fast as possible.”
The intercepted communications from the day of the attack show commanders repeatedly urging their fighters to fulfill this part of the mission.
“Document the scenes of horror, now, and broadcast them on TV channels to the whole world,” a commander from Gaza City called Abu al-Baraa told his operatives near Kibbutz Sa’ad. “Slaughter them. End the children of Israel.” The commander Abu Muath is also heard saying, “It is essential that you bring the drone in so it films for the entire Islamic world.”
This evidence provides a grim and definitive context for the horrific events of October 7, in which Hamas and its allies killed some 1,200 people, the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust, and abducted approximately 250 others.
Ibrahim Madhoun, a Palestinian analyst close to Hamas who was contacted by The New York Times, cast doubt on the authenticity of the memo, asserting that most of the acts described did not occur and that the document did not represent the culture of Hamas's military wing.
However, the direct correlation between the instructions in the memo and the real-time commands and actions captured in the intercepts presents a powerful and damning body of evidence. This new information not only broadens the world's understanding of the horrific events of that day but also reinforces the legal case against Hamas's leaders for war crimes and crimes against humanity, charges that were formally brought by the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor in May 2024.