A bureaucracy of terror: what Hamas planned—and what misfired

Dan Senor had a revealing conversation with investigative reporter Ronen Bergman about the Sinwar memo, Hamas’s method, and the surprises that followed October 7th. The memo that removes doubt Intelligence windfalls are rarely tidy. This one was: a six-page, handwritten memorandum from August 2022 by Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s Gaza chief, recovered in a tunnel complex in Khan Younis. It is not a reverie or a manifesto. It is an operating order. Under the bald heading of “horrific events and images”, it instructs units to generate spectacles of terror—burning kibbutzim with fuel tankers; producing a small set of unforgettable images; mutilating and filming—then to broadcast the results rapidly on social media. The document, Bergman notes, is the clearest link yet between what the world later saw and a deliberate command from the top. Intercepts from Hamas field radios on October 7th echo the memo’s choreography: commanders urging arson, killing and documentation—and ordering fighters back to film when they failed to capture their crimes the first time. The carnage was not improvisation; it was compliance. A modernised movement with an accountant’s soul If much commentary has cast Hamas as a guerrilla brand with theological varnish, the cache of records suggests something colder and more bureaucratic. Hamas, Bergman says, “is obsessive with writing”: minutes, protocols, inventories, even weekly bullet counts in Excel—produced during battle. Israeli raiders have brought back what he calls the largest terrorism archive ever recovered, stored on air-gapped laptops: tens of thousands of pages, years of video, and a paper trail that reads like a mid-level general staff. The point is not merely that Hamas planned. It is that it professionalised: drafting like a military, deceiving like an intelligence service and—critically—producing to a media plan. October 7th was intended to be filmed. Shock as strategy, not by-product Why publicise atrocity when history’s genocidaires tended to conceal theirs? Sinwar’s memo and subsequent meeting protocols lay out three aims. First, shock Israel into a collective trauma—collapse domestic confidence in the state’s basic promise of security, even far from Gaza. On this, the plan largely worked: the psychological harm was instant and national. Second, ignite an “internal front”: uprisings in the West Bank and, more strikingly, among Arab citizens of Israel. Here the scheme failed conspicuously. Unlike the riots that accompanied the 11-day war in May 2021, Israeli Arabs largely recoiled from Hamas’s savagery. Far from joining in, they wanted nothing to do with it. That is a lesser-noticed outcome of the day: the line between Palestinian nationalism and Hamas’s methods sharpened inside Israel, not blurred. Third, trigger a wider “axis of resistance”: Hezbollah and Iran entering a synchronised multi-front war to “go for the whole of Israel”, as one protocol boasts. Hamas tried for months to line up partners and objectives. But when the atrocities became clear, something unusual happened in Beirut and Tehran: disbelief. Hezbollah figures, Bergman reports, initially refused to accept that children had been kidnapped; they assumed Israeli fabrication. When the first hostage releases in November 2023 made the truth undeniable, they were—his word—“shocked”. That shock, and the reputational cost it implied, helps explain why Hezbollah’s response stayed at the lower edge of escalation for months. In a movement steeped in violence, abducting children crossed a line many expected even Hamas would respect. Deception and the calendar The protocols also map a strategic deception. For more than a year Hamas kept out of PIJ spats, pocketed Qatari cash and projected “calm”, encouraging Israel’s comforting thesis that Gaza sought quiet. Meanwhile it surveilled Israeli deployments via social media, debated windows of opportunity—Passover or the High Holidays—and nearly launched in autumn 2022. Sinwar delayed, still hoping to lock in Iran and Hezbollah. By 2023 he judged it a last chance: Israeli society looked fractured by judicial reform protests; a laser interceptor programme promised to complicate Hamas’s rocketry in 2024. Military intelligence cautioned that Israel’s border readiness remained high and that a massive attack would invite a massive reply. Sinwar attacked anyway. Doha was not in the dark Another persistent myth the papers puncture: that Hamas’s political leaders in Qatar were insulated from Gaza’s war plans. The minutes record encrypted video conferences, explicit briefings and, on the eve of the attack, a formal “we informed Doha—therefore we infer consent” notation. It reads less like dissent than deniability engineering. The wager on sacrifice Hamas leaders later told reporters that devastation in Gaza was anticipated, not accidental. Sinwar, in one meeting recounted by Bergman, brushed aside a hypothetical 30,000 Palestinian deaths as akin to an “earthquake”—tragic but tolerable in service of jihad and a regional conflagration that would reorder the conflict. The human calculus was as clear as the media plan. What worked, what backfired By the memo’s yardstick, some goals were met. Israel was traumatised; its deterrence narrative shattered in a day. Internationally, Hamas succeeded in “activating” sympathetic networks and reframing the global conversation: train-track logic that blames the locomotive, not those who tied civilians to the rails. The war broadened across the region—but on terms that, over time, favoured Israel militarily. Where Sinwar miscalculated was the political metabolism of his would-be allies and audiences. Israeli Arabs did not rise; the West Bank did not explode. Hezbollah and Iran, initially repelled by the kidnapping of children—an under-appreciated shock within the axis—chose limited engagement over all-in. The planned Saudi-Israel normalisation was disrupted, but not erased; and the reputational harm to Hamas among Arabs who saw the hostage lists was real, if rarely advertised. The image that wasn’t supposed to exist In 2021, after a previous round of fighting, Sinwar posed smiling on a lone intact sofa amid his home’s ruins—proof that survival equals victory. October 7th sought to upgrade the pose: not merely survival, but regional ignition. He did light a regional fire. He did not control its spread. The ensuing campaign in Gaza devastated his movement’s military wing; Israel meanwhile showed unexpected depth against Iran’s partners. The paradox is stark. A plan built on cinematic cruelty counted on audiences to react predictably. They did not. Inside Israel, the fear was real; inside Israel’s Arab community, the revulsion was decisive. Inside Hezbollah’s war rooms, disbelief at child abductions gave way to a reluctance to spend prestige defending the indefensible. The footnotes that matter Two details linger. First, Hamas’s paperwork fetish—its “minutes of murder”, meticulously version-controlled—will occupy historians for years, not least because it strips away the alibi of chaos. Second, the most consequential reactions to October 7th may be those least discussed in public: the refusal of Israel’s Arab citizens to be drafted into Hamas’s script, and the moment Hezbollah realised that Hamas had, indeed, kidnapped children. Those were not just moral reckonings; they were strategic speed bumps on the road to the regional war Sinwar craved. In the end, bureaucracy met barbarism and put it in writing. The archive shows what Hamas intended. The aftermath shows what it didn’t foresee.