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Middle East conflictLive updatesIsrael-Lebanon strikesHezbollah
explainedRemaining hostages
Middle East conflictLive updatesIsrael-Lebanon strikesHezbollah
explainedRemaining hostages
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CAPTURED DOCUMENTS REVEAL HAMAS’S BROADER AMBITION TO WREAK HAVOC ON ISRAEL


DOZENS OF PAGES FOUND BY ISRAELI TROOPS IN GAZA DETAIL A POTENTIAL HAMAS PLAN
FAR BIGGER THAN THE OCT. 7, 2023, ATTACK, AND SHOW HOW MILITANT LEADERS WANTED
IRANIAN FUNDS AND TRAINING.

14 min
8188

Palestinians celebrate the capture of an Israeli Merkava battle tank on Oct. 7,
2023. (AFP/Getty Images)
By Joby Warrick
, 
Souad Mekhennet
and 
Loveday Morris
October 12, 2024 at 3:37 p.m. EDT

Years before the Oct. 7, 2023, attack, Hamas’s leaders plotted a far deadlier
wave of terrorist assaults against Israel — potentially including a Sept.
11-style toppling of a Tel Aviv skyscraper — while they pressed Iran to assist
in helping achieve their vision of annihilating the Jewish state, according to
documents seized by Israeli forces in Gaza.



Electronic records and papers that Israeli officials say were recovered from
Hamas command centers show advanced planning for attacks using trains, boats and
even horse-drawn chariots — though several plans were ill-formed and highly
impractical, terrorism experts said. The plans anticipate drawing in allied
militant groups for a combined assault against Israel from the north, south and
east.

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The trove of documents includes an annotated, illustrated presentation detailing
possible options for an assault as well as letters from Hamas to Iran’s top
leaders in 2021 requesting hundreds of millions of dollars in funding and
training for 12,000 additional Hamas fighters. It is unclear whether Iran knew
of the planning document or responded to the letters, but Israeli officials view
the requests as part of a larger effort by Hamas to draw its Iranian allies into
the kind of direct confrontation with Israel that Tehran has traditionally
sought to avoid.

The 59 pages of letters and planning documents in Arabic obtained by The
Washington Post represent a fraction of the thousands of records that Israel
Defense Forces say they have seized since Israel’s ground invasion of Gaza began
Oct. 27.

The decision to release the documents comes at a time when Israeli leaders are
weighing a possible retaliatory strike after Iran launched more than 180
ballistic missiles against Israel on Oct. 1, in response to Israel’s Sept. 27
killing of Hasan Nasrallah, the Shiite cleric and leader of Lebanon’s Hezbollah
militant group.

“Hamas is so determined to wipe Israel and the Jewish people off the map that it
managed to drag Iran into direct conflict — under conditions that Iran wasn’t
prepared for,” said an Israeli security official who has reviewed the letters
and planning documents. The official, like others interviewed, spoke on the
condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive documents seized by Israeli forces
in Gaza.


> Translation:
> Strategy to build an appropriate plan to Liberate Palestine
> • What are the appropriate fronts for liberation, and where will each front
> move?
> • If other forces intervened and participated with us, what would the battle
> and coordination look like?
> • What are the targets that we should occupy, neutralize, or destroy?
> — Translation of title page and bullets 4-6 from documents obtained by The
> Washington Post, shown above.

President Joe Biden on Wednesday said the United States supports Israel’s right
to defend itself “against Iran and all its proxies — Hezbollah, Hamas and the
Houthis.”

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“We’re doing everything we can to ease the suffering of all the people from this
war against Hamas and that Hamas started,” Biden said at a White House meeting
with Jewish religious leaders.

In the letters written in 2021, Hamas’s Gaza leader Yahya Sinwar mounts a
vigorous appeal to several senior Iranian officials — including the country’s
supreme leader, Ali Khamenei — for additional financial and military support,
pledging that, with Iran’s backing, he could destroy Israel completely in two
years.

“We promise you that we will not waste a minute or a penny unless it takes us
toward achieving this sacred goal,” states a June 2021 letter with apparent
signatures by Sinwar as well as five other Hamas officials.

In the letters, Sinwar does not provide details of how he intended to destroy
Israel. Israeli and other Middle Eastern officials say Tehran was surprised by
the attack on Oct. 7, and angry at Sinwar for not revealing his intentions in
advance. But they contend that both Iran and its Lebanese proxy Hezbollah knew
that Hamas was making preparations for a major assault. “It was their shared
strategy to attack Israel,” one analyst said. U.S. and Israeli analysts believe
that Iran provided hundreds of millions of dollars to Hamas’s military wing and
increased its support in 2023.

Tehran declined to involve itself directly in Hamas’s fight after the Oct. 7
assault on southern Israel. Since then, as the conflict expanded to include
Hezbollah rocket attacks on northern Israel and IDF strikes on Lebanon, Syria
and Yemen — and, in recent weeks, a land invasion of southern Lebanon — Iran has
been pulled ever deeper into the conflict, including with two massive aerial
assaults on the Jewish state.

Israel’s war in Gaza meanwhile has killed more than 42,000 people, according to
the Gaza Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and
combatants but says the majority of the dead are women and children. In Lebanon,
the death toll is more than 2,000 and growing.

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While the documents’ authenticity could not be definitively established, the
contents are broadly consistent with U.S. and allies’ post-Oct. 7 intelligence
assessments about Hamas’s long-range planning and complex relations with Iran.
U.S. intelligence agencies have seen some of the captured Hamas documents, and
The Post shared copies of its documents with several U.S. officials, none of
whom expressed concern about their authenticity but declined to comment
publicly. The Post also spoke to Israeli officials at other agencies that were
not involved in acquiring the documents, who independently assessed that they
were genuine.

Iran’s mission to the United Nations, in response to questions from The Post,
did not address specific allegations but accused Israel of spreading
disinformation.

“We regard the Israeli regime as a mendacious criminal, anti-human entity and
place no credence in their illusions,” a spokesman for the mission said. “They
have a long history of spreading falsehoods, fabricating already-counterfeit
documents, and conducting deceptive psychological operations.”

Basem Naim, a senior Hamas official, declined to comment on the contents of the
letters and records but said that Israel has a history of fabricating documents.

Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack, planned over many months amid extreme secrecy, called for
simultaneous breachings of the Gaza perimeter wall by an estimated 6,000
fighters who rampaged nearby Israeli military bases, towns and kibbutzim,
killing more than 1,200 people and taking some 250 hostages. The attack, the
brainchild of Sinwar and other leaders of Hamas’s Gaza military wing, was the
deadliest assault against Jewish civilians since the Holocaust.


> Translated:
> The railway line is designated for transporting fuel, which is a weak point in
> the event of a train explosion after moving inside one of the cities (a moving
> bomb).
> — Translation, upper left, from documents obtained by The Washington Post,
> shown above.

But, in the months preceding the attack, Hamas envisioned going much further, a
planning document suggests. A 36-page computer slide presentation created in
late 2022 and discovered at a Hamas outpost in northern Gaza on Nov. 10 lays out
options and scenarios for attacking Israel across multiple fronts, with targets
ranging from military command centers to shopping malls.

The Arabic document, titled, “Strategy to build an appropriate plan to Liberate
Palestine,” contains dozens of maps, photographs and schematics depicting the
movement of Hamas fighters against Israeli targets, and a possible sequence for
attacks.

“We present to you this vision, which talks about the appropriate strategy for
liberation in the near future, God willing,” the presentation’s preamble states.


INTELLIGENCE FROM THOUSANDS OF PHOTOS, MAPS

According to the presentation, the attack plans were based on a “large database”
that included more than 17,000 photographs — from satellite images to photos of
Israeli cities and landscapes taken by drone cameras or gleaned from social
media postings. Among the images displayed are the layouts of Israeli air bases
and military installations and diagrams showing the flight patterns of
commercial aircraft using Ben Gurion International Airport outside Tel Aviv.

The presentation outlines three possible attack vectors, and suggests tactics to
deceive Israeli security officials and confuse their response. The plans include
a mix of low-tech operations, some of which were used on Oct. 7, and others that
appear to be more aspirational.

Among the latter was a plan to destroy a Tel Aviv skyscraper. The document
identifies as possible targets the Moshe Aviv Tower, a 70-story building that is
Israel’s second tallest, as well as the Azrieli Center complex which comprises
three skyscrapers, a large shopping mall, train station and cinema. The plan
notes the nearby presence of the IDF headquarters building and suggests that the
collapse of a nearby high-rise could crush the military facility as well.


> Translated:
> If this tower is destroyed in one way or another, an unprecedented crisis will
> occur for the enemy, similar to the crisis of the World Trade Center towers in
> New York.
> — Translation, lower right, from documents obtained by The Washington Post,
> shown above.

But Hamas had apparently not figured out exactly how the buildings might be
taken down, the document acknowledges. “Working to find a mechanism to destroy
the tower,” it states.

A more practical target, Hamas believed, was Israel’s rail system. The document
describes several variations of a plan to use railways to transport fighters and
powerful explosives — including fuel tankers that could be detonated with small
bombs — in Israel’s largest city. “The railway line is designated for
transporting fuel, which is a weak point in the event of a train explosion after
moving inside one of the cities (a moving bomb),” it states.

Other plans called for modifying vehicles so they could travel on rails, and
turning fishing vessels into high-speed attack boats to carry fighters and
explosives into Israeli ports. Referring to the boats-as-bombs plan, the
document said Hamas had already “found a mechanism that works.”

Perhaps the most unusual proposal was a plan to resurrect the horse-drawn
carriages of antiquity as modern conveyances for fighters and weapons. The
presentation includes photographs and descriptions of a three-man chariot drawn
by horses that can cross rugged terrain with ease. A chariot would offer a “fast
and light mechanism” that emits little heat or sound compared with a motorcycle
— a vehicle that Hamas fighters used in abundance in the Oct. 7 attack.

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“It carries three people, one of whom is free to drive and the other two to
shoot and fight,” the document says of the chariots.

Implicit in the plan is the conviction that Hamas’s closest allies would fully
join the fight after noting the successes of the group’s initial forays into
Israel. U.S. and Israeli officials believe that Sinwar, who declined to share
details of the Oct. 7 plan with Hezbollah or Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard
Corps in advance of the attack, convinced himself that a Hamas attack on Israel
would spark a broader war that both groups eventually would be compelled to
join.

An essential part of any operation, the document says, would be “linking and
preparing the external fronts (Lebanon, Syria, and Sinai) and agreeing on
mechanisms for communicating peacefully and in war.”

Hezbollah did begin firing rockets into northern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023,
barrages that inflicted hundreds of casualties and prompted the evacuation of
nearly 100,000 Israeli civilians. But the militant group — assessed to have tens
of thousands of fighters and up to 100,000 missiles before the fighting
commenced — declined to launch a full-scale assault.


SEEKING IRAN’S BUY-IN, AND MORE

Sinwar, renowned for his paranoia about leaks, apparently opted to refrain from
sharing his ultimate attack plans with Hamas’s chief benefactors in Beirut and
Tehran. But the Hamas leader was crystal clear about his ultimate intention: the
destruction of the state of Israel. He repeats the point multiple times in the
captured letters and asks Iranian officials to help him in his quest.

A series of letters dated in June 2021 are essentially pleas to Iran’s leaders
to send more money and provide training for a division’s worth of new fighters.

The letters, signed by Sinwar and other Hamas leaders in Gaza, are addressed to
Khamenei as well as Ismail Qaani, the leader of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard
Corps’ Quds Force — an elite unit that oversees Iran’s far-flung network of
proxy militias — and Sayed Izadi, the Quds Force’s Beirut-based head of
Palestinian operations. The letters were found in January in Sinwar’s command
bunker in Khan Younis, Israeli officials said.

In the letters, Sinwar describes the extensive damage sustained by Hamas during
clashes with Israel in May 2021, and asks the Iranians to make up for the losses
and help the group prepare for much larger battles to come.

“We are in dire need of your standing with us with all strength, determination,
support and backing; first to restore our strength and what has been exhausted
in this confrontation or what has been targeted, and to develop our capabilities
many times over,” he writes in the letter to Qaani.


> Translated:
> When thinking about the liberation plan, a fast and light vehicle must be
> found that you can use infantry weapons from it in order to preoccupy the
> military sites and vehicles along the borders as a secondary attack. The
> Pharaohs’ chariot can be used for this mission.
> — Translated, bottom left, from documents obtained by The Washington Post,
> shown above.

The details of the request are laid out in two of the letters: financial
assistance for Hamas, totaling $500 million, paid in monthly installments over
two years, and Iranian training and equipment to support an additional 12,000
Hamas fighters.

If Hamas receives the aid, “we are confident that we and you, by the end of
these two years or during them, if God wills, we will uproot this monstrous
entity,” meaning Israel, Sinwar writes to Qaani.

“We, and you, will change the face of the region and end, God willing, this dark
era of the history of our Islamic nation,” he writes.

Iranian officials have publicly supported Hamas’s avowed goal for the
destruction of Israel, and they expressed no reservations about the methods used
on Oct. 7, noted Farzin Nadimi, an Iran expert and senior fellow with the
Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a think tank.

“Iran trained Hamas and encouraged them to do exactly the things they did on
Oct. 7,” Nadimi said. “Their goal was to get to the core of the Israeli state
and crush it.”

At the same time, Tehran has generally sought to use proxy forces to carry out
operations against Israel, rather than risking a direct attack that might lead
to a military confrontation with a technologically superior foe.

“Iran’s goal is to delegitimize Israel, not to help Hamas achieve an impossible
military victory,” said Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran analyst and senior fellow at
the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Washington think tank.
“Horrific images of Palestinian suffering is precisely how they’ve sought to
delegitimize Israel.”

Hamas’s relations with Iran have always been complex. A Sunni Islamist group,
Hamas sought for years to buffer the influence of Shiite-ruled Iran, said Udi
Levi, an expert on Hamas financing who has examined around 100 documents seized
by the Israeli military inside Gaza over the course of the war. Since 2014,
documents show a shift in the relationship, with Hamas courting more Iranian
support. Iran in turn showed more interest in directing how money was spent,
Levi added.

“It became more and more aggressive,” he said of Iran’s oversight. “The Iranians
found a way to be more influential on Sinwar and the Hamas leadership in Gaza.”
The documents shed no new light on if or how Iranian money was delivered to
Gaza, but the typical channels include informal money exchanges and
cryptocurrencies, Levi said.

The documents obtained by The Post include detailed notes from meetings where
Hamas officials apparently discussed routine governmental responsibilities and
expenditures, such as sanitation and fuel shortages.

But they also describe what analysts and intelligence officials have seen as a
potential motive for the surprise Oct. 7 assault. Minutes from an October 2023
politburo meeting depict Hamas leaders bemoaning the improvement in relations
between Israeli and Arab Gulf states, a trend that would “open the door for Arab
and Islamic countries to descend on the same path, and will increase the
complications of the resistance project,” the document notes.

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Cate Brown, Hazem Balousha and Mohamad El Chamma contributed to this report.

correction

A previous version of this article incorrectly said that Sayed Izadi, an
official with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force, was among
the casualties in an Israeli airstrike on an Iranian diplomatic compound in
Damascus, Syria. According to social media posts and intelligence officials, he
is still alive. The article has been corrected.


MIDDLE EAST CONFLICT

The Israel-Gaza war has gone on for over a year, and tensions have spilled into
the surrounding Middle East region.



The war: On Oct. 7, Hamas militants launched an unprecedented cross-border
attack on Israel, killing about 1,200 people and taking civilian hostages. See
photos and videos of how the deadly assault unfolded. Israel declared war on
Hamas in response, launching a ground invasion that fueled the biggest
displacement in the region since Israel’s creation in 1948. In July 2024, Hamas
leader Ismail Haniyeh was killed in an attack Hamas has blamed on Israel.

Hezbollah: Hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah, a militant organization
backed by Iran, have escalated over the past year, leading to an Israeli
invasion of southern Lebanon. Israel’s airstrikes into Lebanon have grown more
intense and deadly, killing over 1,400 people including Hasan Nasrallah,
Hezbollah’s longtime leader. The Israel-Lebanon border has a history of violence
that dates back to Israel’s founding.

Gaza crisis: In the Gaza Strip, Israel has waged one of this century’s most
destructive wars, killing tens of thousands and plunging at least half of the
population into “famine-like conditions.” For months, Israel has resisted
pressure from Western allies to allow more humanitarian aid into the enclave.

U.S. involvement: Despite tensions between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu and some U.S. politicians, including President Biden, the United
States supports Israel with weapons, funds aid packages, and has vetoed or
abstained from the United Nations’ cease-fire resolutions.

History: The roots of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and mistrust are deep and
complex, predating the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. Read more
on the history of the Gaza Strip.

Show more

Share
8188 Comments
Middle East conflict
HAND CURATED
 * A timeline of conflict on the Israel-Lebanon border
   October 1, 2024
   
   A timeline of conflict on the Israel-Lebanon border
   October 1, 2024
 * Israeli military deaths in Lebanon raise questions over war’s scope 
   October 2, 2024
   
   Israeli military deaths in Lebanon raise questions over war’s scope 
   October 2, 2024
 * Hezbollah is undeterred as Lebanon braces for war with Israel
   August 11, 2024
   
   Hezbollah is undeterred as Lebanon braces for war with Israel
   August 11, 2024

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