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- 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.
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.
“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.
- “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.
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.
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