A Sinister Blueprint: Newly Recovered Sinwar Memo Lays Bare Hamas’s Calculated Plan for October 7th Massacre

By: Fern Sidman

A six-page document discovered in Gaza this year has delivered a damning addition to the record of October 7, 2023 — the day Hamas’s coordinated onslaught swept across southern Israel, leaving more than 1,200 people dead and 251 abducted. Believed to have been authored by Yahya Sinwar, the terror group’s now-slain leader in Gaza and widely regarded as the architect of the raid, the memo delineates in chilling detail instructions to target civilians, set neighborhoods ablaze and film the atrocities for immediate broadcast, The New York Times reported on Saturday. The Times of Israel has extensively covered the document and its implications, treating the memo as a critical piece of evidence that underscores the premeditated and systematic nature of what Hamas carried out that day.

The memo — dated August 24, 2022 — surfaced after Israeli security forces raided an underground complex allegedly used by Sinwar’s brother and successor, Muhammad Sinwar, who was himself subsequently killed in an operation, the army said. Seven Israeli officials, cited in The New York Times report, told investigators the material “appears to be a directive” for the assault that unfolded more than a year later. The Times of Israel report on Saturday detailed how the document’s contents were echoed in real time by intercepted battalion orders issued on October 7, when commanders urged fighters over communications channels to “start setting homes on fire,” to “slaughter” and “slit their throats,” and to take “a lot of hostages.”

Taken together, the documents paint a portrait of an operation conceived not merely as a military strike against combatants but as a campaign deliberately designed to terrorize a civilian population, to amplify horror through media, and to attempt to catalyze a wider regional conflagration.

The memo’s prescriptions are stark and unvarnished. It recommends using bulldozers to breach the Gaza–Israel fence, ordering fighters to advance in multiple waves and to use fuel from tankers — “gasoline or diesel from a tanker” — to set entire neighborhoods alight. It explicitly calls for assaults on both soldiers and civilian communities, instructs militants to “stomp on the heads of soldiers,” to engage at “point-blank range” and to “slaughter some of them with knives,” and even to “blow up tanks.”

Crucially, the document insists that these crimes be captured on camera and transmitted as widely and swiftly as possible: “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,” it states, according to the report in The New York Times. Intercepted orders on the day of the attack demonstrate that the call to record and disseminate scenes of mutilation and burning was not rhetorical: commanders told fighters to bring drones and to broadcast “for the entire Islamic world,” and to “document the scenes of horror” and “broadcast them on TV channels to the whole world.”

That element — the intent to weaponize imagery of atrocity — was a defining characteristic of October 7. As The Times of Israel and other outlets have reported in the months since, footage and livestreamed content from the attack circulated rapidly across social and broadcast channels, amplifying shock and grief and, according to Israeli authorities, galvanizing further recruitment and extremist sentiment in some quarters.

The methods advocated in the memo were brutally executed in the field. Kibbutz Nir Oz, one of the settlements targeted on October 7, was effectively razed when attackers entered the majority of its homes. As catalogued by Israeli investigators and chronicled in The Times of Israel report, more than a quarter of Nir Oz’s residents — 117 of roughly 400 people — were murdered or kidnapped; nine of those abducted remain in Gaza, of whom only five are believed to be alive. Across the border communities and at the Supernova music festival, Hamas fighters set fire to homes and tents, herded civilians into burning buildings and fields, shot those attempting to flee, and transported captives into Gaza. The memoirized orders to “burn, burn” were realized with horrific efficiency.

The discovery of the Sinwar memo also confirms what many observers had long suspected: October 7 was not an impulsive eruption of violence but the culmination of a planned campaign that targeted the most vulnerable — families in their homes, worshippers, and festivalgoers — with the dual aim of causing immediate carnage and of broadcasting fear to destabilize Israel politically and psychologically.

The contents of the memo carry immediate legal and moral consequences. International humanitarian law — the corpus of rules governing conduct in armed conflict — forbids deliberate attacks on civilians and the use of methods meant to terrorize the population. The directives to kill noncombatants, to burn inhabited areas, and to take hostages are violations that, under the jurisprudence of war crimes and crimes against humanity, could be prosecuted at domestic or international tribunals.

The Times of Israel report underscored how the memo may strengthen criminal cases and the broader historical record establishing Hamas’s culpability for systematic atrocities. For families of victims and for Israeli prosecutors, the document provides a contemporaneous statement of intent: a blueprint demonstrating premeditation, a key element in international criminal law.

At the same time, the memo will likely be central to the political contest over how the conflict and its aftermath are framed globally. Hamas has long insisted that its actions are resistance to occupation; documents of this nature make that defense untenable in the face of explicit orders to target civilians and to plot mass arson.

The memo’s existence, and its date more than a year prior to the attack, also reignite uncomfortable questions about intelligence assessments and preparedness. If instructions for such an operation were circulating among senior Hamas leadership in August 2022, what did Israeli and allied intelligence detect, and how was the apparent intent not translated into effective preventive action? The Times of Israel — along with other Israeli media outlets — has probed this question repeatedly, documenting public and internal scrutiny over lapses that left communities exposed.

Israeli officials have offered varied explanations, faulting a combination of Hamas operational security, intelligence gaps, and the complexity of anticipating an attack of that magnitude. The Sinwar memo will deepen inquiry, both within Israeli institutions and among allied partners, into how signals of intent are evaluated and whether more aggressive disruption of terrorist planning could have averted the catastrophe.

The Sinwar document also articulates a strategic communications objective: to spark broader unrest across the Palestinian territories and beyond. By urging the Hamas terrorists to broadcast their actions, Sinwar sought to “evoke fear in Israelis and destabilize the country,” and to “encourage people beyond Gaza to join the fight, including in the West Bank.” That aspiration — to convert operational horror into regional momentum — partially explains the concerted effort to disseminate filmed atrocities.

Analysis published by The Times of Israel has emphasized how the visual propagation of violence can have complex effects: while it may embolden some extremists, it has also hardened international sympathy for victims and increased scrutiny of groups that employ such tactics. The memo’s instructions, therefore, represent not only an operational doctrine but a strategic bet that broadcasting terror would yield political dividends.

As the conflict’s human and political consequences continue to unfold, the newly recovered Sinwar memo will occupy a central place in how October 7 is remembered, investigated and adjudicated. For victims’ families, the document is both confirmation of intent and a further wound — hard evidence that their loved ones were targeted as part of a designed campaign of terror. For Israeli policymakers and military planners, it is a sobering reminder of the need for vigilance and decisive policy options to prevent recurrence.

The Times of Israel has repeatedly reported that the hunt for accountability — criminal, political, and moral — will proceed on multiple fronts: through military operations to degrade Hamas’s capacity, through legal proceedings that may draw on the memo and related intercepts, and through diplomatic efforts to ensure that international actors recognize the premeditated nature of the crimes. The memo will also inform historical narratives and scholarly study for decades to come, supplying contemporaneous documentation of intent that starkly challenges any attempt at revisionism or denial.

In the ashes of the communities targeted on October 7, and amid the ongoing negotiations and ceasefire arrangements that have followed, the Sinwar memo stands as a testament to calculated brutality — a paper trail linking high-level leadership to the worst single day of Jewish loss since the Holocaust. It is now part of the evidentiary corpus that historians, prosecutors, and the public will use to reckon with what occurred, why it occurred, and what must be done to ensure it never happens again. The Times of Israel — and other outlets that have reported and contextualized the document — will continue to scrutinize its provenance, its implications, and the responsibilities it demands of those charged with protecting civilians and upholding the rule of law.