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| Former Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar |
On Sunday, Israel's Channel 12 published details of a document written in his own hand by former Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar a year before the "Al-Aqsa Flood" operation on October 7, 2023.
The channel says that Yahya Sinwar, the engineer of October 7, described in detail in a handwritten document how the attack on Israel should look.
He specified precisely the number of elements to be sent to each settlement or crossroads, and the manpower needed to breach the surrounding fence.
Sinwar also prepared for Tel Aviv's response and the possibility of the Israeli army using nuclear weapons.
In detail, the channel says that even after nearly three years since that day, more details are still emerging about Yahya Sinwar’s planning of the attack.
She adds, "What happened on the morning of October 7th was not spontaneous, but rather a meticulous and organized plan, carefully and secretly devised."
The Hebrew channel explains that the document, written by Sinwar himself in his own handwriting, describes the attack plan in minute detail, drawing maps of the population, settlements, intersections, and military areas, and distributing the operational teams according to Hamas’s objectives.
Sinwar believes that the key to the success of the operation lies in controlling the main intersections in the south, where he planned to breach the Gaza envelope through the border fence at 25 simultaneous points and control the intersections using separate, well-trained teams, each comprising 100 fighters, for a total of 2,500 personnel.
According to the same source, Sinwar added on another page: "The goal is to expel the settlers in the south with their cars, with priority given to children and women. Men between the ages of 17 and 50 are held as hostages, with all their phones and any other documents they carry being confiscated."
The channel explains that 3,100 Hamas members stormed the border fence on the morning of October 7 in three waves, and were joined by 580 members of the Islamic Jihad movement.
But originally, Sinwar’s plan was to bring in a large number of fighters, at least three times the number, and he specified it as follows: 2,210 would be distributed among 221 kibbutzim and small communities.
He also allocated 1,600 personnel to eight larger communities, and another 2,000 armed men to military bases.
In addition to the 2,500 personnel who were supposed to control the intersections, he concluded by writing: "In total, 10,000 well-trained fighters will invade."
What did Sinwar expect Israel's response to be?
It is hard not to be impressed by the madness of the plan, especially when Sinwar takes into account that Israel’s response may be the harshest ever, as he wrote under the definition of the “defense plan”: “The enemy will not hesitate to use the means and weapons available to him, not only through attacks, but also through other means and may even use a nuclear bomb.”
Sinwar adds: “But the enemy will be surprised by the attack first, and will enter a state of chaos. To ensure safety, a popular operation must be organized to return to the villages and symbolically reclaim them.” He emphasized in the message that this campaign is a matter of life or death, and there will be life, God willing.
The Hebrew channel stated that the "Amit Institute for Terrorism and Intelligence Research" will publish the full document in the coming days, and it provides further evidence of Hamas's excessive self-confidence and its firm conviction that the invasion will lead to the unification of the arenas, and ultimately to the destruction of Israel.
The New York Times reported on October 11, 2025, that Israeli intelligence had found inside a tunnel in Gaza a handwritten document by former Hamas leader in the Strip, Yahya Sinwar, containing detailed instructions for carrying out the October 7 attack.
The newspaper reported that a handwriting expert from the Israeli police concluded that the handwriting matched that of Yahya Sinwar.
The newspaper report stated that the 5-page document, written in Arabic in August 2022, included orders to harm soldiers and civilians, set fire to residential neighborhoods, and document acts of violence for the purpose of intimidation and destabilization in Israel.
The text also included explicit instructions to "set houses ablaze with diesel or gasoline" and to carry out "two or three operations in which an entire settlement is burned down," according to the report.
The report added that intercepted communications carried out by Unit 8200 on the day of the attack showed that Hamas field commanders urged the attackers to "burn everything, to set the entire kibbutz ablaze," while others gave "orders to slaughter the soldiers at close range, document the scenes, and broadcast them to the whole world."
Israeli sources told the American newspaper that these documents prove that Hamas had planned the attack in advance.
The newspaper noted that Israel is currently using this data to analyze the intelligence failures that preceded the operation and the kidnappings.
