Israeli military and intelligence officials say they recovered a handwritten six-page memo believed to be from Yahya Sinwar that lays out explicit orders to target Israeli soldiers and civilians and to broadcast atrocities to sow fear and instability.

The document, dated Aug. 24, 2022, was discovered this spring on a standalone computer inside an underground compound used by Muhammed Sinwar, the senior Hamas commander whom Israel killed in May 2025, according to seven Israeli officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The New York Times obtained a copy of the memo and reviewed it with Israeli experts who say the handwriting matches other samples attributed to Yahya Sinwar. Israeli intercepts of battlefield communications from Oct. 7, 2023 — previously unreported hours of audio reviewed by The Times — contain commands that officials say echo the memo’s brutal directives.

If authenticated, the memo would provide rare written evidence tying senior Hamas leadership to a campaign that explicitly targeted civilians, Israeli officials said — undercutting Hamas’s public claims about the nature and intent of the Oct. 7 assault that killed about 1,200 people and spurred a two-year long retaliatory war in Gaza that devastated large parts of the territory.

“What the material shows is a deliberately planned, shock-value operation aimed at terrorizing the civilian population and destabilizing Israel,” said one Israeli official describing the memo and the intercepts. A confidential report prepared by the Gazit Institute, an Israeli military intelligence-linked think tank that reviewed the materials, concluded the leadership “planned and carried out an attack that featured acts of ‘extraordinary brutality.’”

The memo — written in Arabic and found as an image file on a computer not connected to any online network — urges fighters to break through the Gaza-Israel fence, enter civilian neighborhoods, burn homes “with gasoline or diesel from a tanker,” and film violent acts to broadcast widely. It contains graphic language instructing commanders to “stomp on the heads of soldiers,” “slit their throats,” and “slaughter” at point-blank range.

Israeli intercepts captured on Oct. 7 by Unit 8200, the military’s signals intelligence arm, include on-the-ground commands that mirror the memo’s language. In one passage cited by Israeli sources, a Gaza City commander identified only as “Abu Muhammed” is heard telling subordinates just before 10 a.m.: “Start setting homes on fire. Burn, burn. I want the whole kibbutz to be in flames.” Another interlocutor, “Abu al-Abed,” is recorded saying: “Set fire to anything.”

Other messages recorded that day urged terrorists to take many hostages and to film and broadcast scenes of violence to mobilize sympathizers across the region. “Document the scenes of horror, now, and broadcast them on TV channels to the whole world,” a commander heard in the intercepts says.

Hamas officials did not answer questions from The New York Times about the memo. Izzat al-Rishq, director of Hamas’s media office in Qatar, did not respond to a request for comment. A Palestinian analyst close to Hamas, Ibrahim Madhoun, told The Times he doubted the memo’s authenticity and said many of the acts described — such as burning entire neighborhoods — did not match his view of how the assault unfolded, even while acknowledging that many homes were set ablaze.

Israeli authorities asked a former police document-expert, Sima Ankona, to compare the memo with samples collected over time that were attributed to Yahya Sinwar, including a 2018 note and a signature from a 1989 police statement. Ankona concluded the handwriting matched those earlier samples.

Israeli officials say the newly surfaced documents have been studied internally to deepen understanding of how Oct. 7 was planned and executed. The findings have also intensified questions inside Israel about intelligence failures that allowed the assault to take place, and why such planning documents were not discovered sooner.

“The Oct. 7 offensive exposed severe lapses,” one Israeli security official said. “These materials help explain intent and method, but they also sharpen the question of why we did not find this earlier.”

Under international law, deliberately targeting civilians and taking hostages are among the most serious violations; the newly disclosed memo, if authenticated, would be cited by prosecutors and advocates as evidence of such intent.

Analysts said the memo’s instructions to film and disseminate violence underscore a strategic aim beyond immediate battlefield gains: to inflame public sentiment, recruit supporters and provoke instability well beyond Gaza’s borders.

“The instruction to broadcast the scenes shows this was not merely an operational plan,” said Eitan Hirsch, a scholar of militant propaganda. “It was designed to produce an effect in the wider Arab world.”

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