Uncovered: Sinwar's 10/7 Masterplan - with Ronen Bergman

You are listening to an art media podcast.

So, on the third graph of this memo, titled Under Horrific Events and Images, Sinoa writes: Events must be planned in advance from which horrific images will emerge and create terrifying destruction, heartbreaking sights, a terrible fire, five or even ten images will instill mortal fear in the Israelis.

And then he says, two or three operations must be organized whose purpose is the burning of an entire neighborhood or kibbutz.

They will pour fuel or diesel from a special tanker, burn the place, and broadcast the images.

And then he goes to explain what's the purpose of decapitating bodies and injecting it into social media.

It's 7 p.m.

on Wednesday, October 22nd here in New York City.

It is 2 a.m.

on Thursday, October 23rd in Israel, where Israelis continue to slowly receive bodies of the remains of hostages that were killed on October 7th and were in Gaza.

Before we get into today's conversation, just one quick housekeeping note: a reminder that on Thursday, October 23rd at 8.30 p.m., Amit Segel and Nadavael and I will be at the Striker Center in New York City for a live podcast, a live taping of the Call Me Back podcast, where we will be having a long and meaty conversation about where Israel is now post-deal, or at least as the deal is being implemented, and where things are going.

And then we have a bunch of other questions that have been sent into

from Inside Call Me Back subscribers that we will be getting into as well.

A lot of ground to cover.

It'll be in front of a live audience.

If you are still interested in registering, please go to the Striker Center website or just follow the link in the show notes to register.

There's still a few seats left.

Now, on to today's conversation.

Tuesday night, Hamas returned the bodies of two more slain hostages, later identified as 85-year-old Ari Zamanovich and 38-year-old Tamir Adar, both residents of Kibutz near Oz.

In fact, Zamanovich was one of the founders of Kibutz near Oz.

This brings the total number of hostages' bodies still being held by Hamas to 13.

Hamas claims that it is unable to locate the remaining corpses and will require additional machinery to do so.

Meanwhile, U.S.

Envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner were back in Israel this morning to push forward the second phase of President Trump's Gaza Plan.

And on Tuesday morning, they met with nine of the 20 former hostages who returned to Israel just over one week ago.

Also on Tuesday, U.S.

Vice President J.D.

Vance arrived in Israel as part of the effort to strengthen the ceasefire and ensure the continuation of Trump's Gaza Plan implementation.

Vance visited the new U.S.-Israel Ceasefire Coordination Center in the southern city of Kiryat Ghat, where he spoke about the need to fully fully disarm Hamas.

Today, Vice President Vance and Prime Minister Netanyahu held a joint press conference from the Prime Minister's office in Jerusalem, in which Vance emphasized America's commitment to rebuilding Gaza and promoted the expansion of the Abraham Accords.

During his visit, the Vice President also visited the city of David, Ir David, and hailed it as a, quote, World Heritage Site.

This was the same Ir David and the same site that Secretary Rubio visited a few weeks ago.

The vice president also appeared to be supportive of and sympathetic to Israel's concerns about any future role in Gaza for Turkey.

President Trump has been mounting public pressure on Hamas to cease violence against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and adhere to the terms of the ceasefire.

He told reporters at the White House that if Hamas does not behave, quote, we're going to eradicate them.

While President Trump advances his plan for Gaza, he is set to welcome Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to the White House in mid-November, during which the president is expected to push for Israel's Saudi normalization, while MBS will, we expect, request security guarantees from the U.S.

Now on to today's conversation.

We are joined by Israeli journalist and call-me-back veteran Ronan Bergman.

Ronan is currently working on a book with a colleague from the New York Times, Mark Mazzetti, about the years, in fact decades leading up to October 7th, and that book should be published within about a year.

Ronan recently co-wrote a piece for the New York Times titled A Memo in a Bunker: Intercepted Communications and Hamas's October 7 Plans, in which he and his co-author, Adam Rascon, discuss a recently uncovered six-page memo, which Israeli officials believe was written by October 7th architect Yekya Sinwar with instructions, very specific instructions for the October 7th assault and massacre.

The memo is dated August 24th, 2022, and may grant us additional insight into what Hamas hoped to achieve in launching the October 7th war.

Before we start the conversation, I just wanted to flag for our listeners that some of the details that we will be discussing this episode, as they were revealed by these memos, are pretty graphic about the horrific and bloody events of October 7th.

So just wanted to warn listeners in advance.

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And I'm pleased to welcome back to the podcast Ronen Bergman.

Ronen, good to see you.

Hi, Dan.

Good to see you.

Ronen, you obtained and reported on the Hamas Protocols documents that the IDF had seized after Sinoir was killed.

Those documents are the recorded minutes of 10 secretly held meetings in which Hamas leaders had planned the October 7th attacks, as we understand these documents.

But I want to go right to the news here, which is last week you obtained and reported on a new document captured by the IDF, which was handwritten by Sinoir.

So I just want to start with the most recent news.

You telling me about the discovery of this document and what was in it.

So together with my great colleague Adam Rascon, we revealed in the story in the New York Times basically two new sources that shed new light and give us a much better understanding of the decision-making process prior to the attack of October 7

and the execution of that decision-making process.

Now, We have seen many, many, many of these horrible atrocities executed by Hamas.

And it was clear that such atrocities that are taking place in different scenes at the same time over the border inside Israeli communities, the result of some order coming from Hamas, from the organizational level.

But this document, the Sinoir written memo, is the first identification of the order itself coming from the supreme commander of Hamas.

And it was found recently it was found in late June in the tunnel under the American hospital in Khan Yunes

this is where the brother of Sinoar Mohammed Sinoar was hiding he was killed there by an Israeli operation and after killing him Israeli commandos raided that tunnel and they brought throves of documents and computer records.

In these computer records, they found parts of the Yikya Sinoir archive.

And there are many, many interesting documents and records over there.

But the most important, I think, historically most important, is a six-pages handwritten memoir from Yigha Sinoar from August 2022.

There's a tendency to think of Hamas as this ragtag militia, the way we think of.

Kalachnikov's and the sleepers.

Right.

But in fact, you know, since Gaza disengagement in 2005, but really after, certainly after Sinwar returns to Gaza after being released from the Israeli prison in 2011, you start to see this transformation of Hamas and this real modernization and professionalization of Hamas as a military organization to the point that it's like a light infantry force of a sovereign nation.

And therefore, these are professionally...

drafted, organized documents that are really used the way in any military organization, written communications are used to document planning, document principles, goals for purposes of internal communications and internal dissemination.

It really is like a professional process.

It's not just like some guy jotting down his thoughts like for in his journal.

It's even much more than that.

You know, I have some idea of how intelligence communities write documents, memos, producing records of sort, military infrastructures.

I know a little bit about how American companies work and how many documents or memos or reports.

I have never seen an organization that is so obsessive with writing documents, reports, memos, minutes, protocols.

Really?

I have never seen anything like that.

For everything, they produce an Excel sheet.

Every battalion commander every week needs to report how many bullets he has left, even during battle.

And they have invested so much work into documenting everything that when Israel invaded Gaza during the war, it recreated the unit that was disbanded long ago after people thought that there will not be any such war anymore.

And these are special operatives that are going into the battlefield to search for documents, for computer records.

And they brought back from Gaza 80 petabytes.

of information.

Would you explain what that is?

We're talking about something like 10 million pages and 40 years of video.

And this is the biggest throve of records on terrorism, I think, ever created.

It's much, much, much larger than the al-Qaeda files that were seized by the US or any other kind of terrorist organization archive.

And what we see inside them is basically we now know so much on what was the decision-making process, how they prepared themselves, the deception and others.

And the whole chain of events, including that document, when Sinoir getting ready to attack in 2022, he takes the war plan and he writes his own comments and orders, additions to the war plan, to the attack plan.

How do we know it was Sinoar's handwriting?

So the Israeli military has samples of handwriting from all the Hamas seniors.

They use computers, etc.

But we do our own vetting

and we matched the Sinoar's handwriting.

An expert helped us with vast, vast experience as working in police forensic lamps, vast experience with handwritings in Arabic, which need special expertise.

This was written in August 2022.

And in the meeting of the Supreme Military Council of Hamas, which is the highest, the most secretive forum where they decided on the planning and the execution of the attack, they write, Abu Ibrahim, the nickname nickname for Sinoir, Abu Ibrahim reviewed the attack plan and wrote his comments.

And they were found in totally different places.

So we have a perfect overlap.

And of course, more than anything else, what he says, what he orders in that memo, unfortunately, tragically, is being executed on October 7th in the battlefield.

Okay, so what was the directive in the document?

So the directive in the document,

there's a lot of military maneuvering and others, tactical, but the most important appears in the first few graphs of these six pages.

Do you want me to actually read from the document?

Yeah, go ahead.

So on the third graph of this memo, titled Under Horrific Events and Images, Sinoa writes, Events must be planned in advance from which horrific images will emerge.

Several burning car bombs that will explode at the post or building and create terrifying destruction, heartbreaking sights, a terrible fire, five or even ten images will instill mortal fear in them, so their enemy, the Israelis.

And then a quote from the Quran, and then he says, two or three operations must be organized whose purpose is the burning of an entire neighborhood, or kibbutz and the like.

They will pour fuel or diesel from a special tanker, burn the place and broadcast the images.

And then he goes to explain what's the purpose of doing that, dealing with stabbing, with decapitating bodies.

And more important for him is they documenting this and injecting it into social media.

You listened to hundreds of hours of Hamas intercepted radio communications that were recorded on October 7th by Shimona Mataim, which is the unit 8200.

In what way do those intercepts, you've listened to Hamas talking to Hamas as they're executing October 7th.

In what way do those intercepts echo Sinwar's directive, Sinwar's memo?

And just to explain them, so there's like the top commanders, even medium-level commanders, did not invade Israel.

They stayed behind.

So it's like sort of the opposite from being ahead of the forces.

And the Hamas...

terrorists are inside Israel and they have tactical wireless, Oki-Toki, to speak with their commanders on many, many, many channels.

And 8200 recorded that.

And what you see is the exact execution.

So the commanders are telling them, burn this or behand civilians or soldiers and document.

Do this on video.

I just don't want to get into horrible description, but there's something horrible, horrible that they are doing.

Can you describe it without getting too graphically detailed, just so people can understand?

It's the terrible humiliation and mutilation of bodies of soldiers and civilians.

And in one case, the commander in Gaza understands that they did not shoot this on video and he sends them back to do this again and shoot this on video.

There's even like a sort of a pocket guide to the Nukbah how to take a video and then inject that into the social media as soon as possible.

And I think that the Israeli public started to see them around 15 past eight o'clock in the morning.

So the raid, the attack started a little bit before 6.30.

So less than two hours afterwards, the Israeli social media started, already started to be flooded with the most horrible, horrible scenes.

And I think you won't be finding any Israeli who wouldn't say, at the beginning, I thought it's a hoax.

I thought it's fabrication.

There are very specific orders about bringing back heads, literally the heads of Israelis, very specific orders about burning communities.

I also think there's a tendency when you watch either the images that we all saw on television or on the internet, or you watch the, as many of us have, that 40-plus-minute video, there's an element to this that looks improvisational, like these wild terrorists or these young men, drugged up, going crazy, just acting wild and at their own initiative.

I think what your reporting reveals is all of this was very specific.

No one was just improvising, right?

So, can you talk a little bit about that?

How the specific commands in terms of how to do what to do?

As we saw in what Sinoar wrote, they were planning on few specific occasions throughout the front where they do the burning, bringing gasoline or diesel or any other burning material in order to set everything on fire.

The question whether this was a coincident or not is, of course, answered by the fact that not just Sinoar ordered that, but the commanders in Gaza say, do not forget to put this on video.

do not forget, bring me a hand as a souvenir.

Stamping on bodies, stamping on hands.

And the reference, unlike Hamas' denial afterwards, all of it is about civilians and soldiers.

You know, Hamas afterwards said this was only against Israeli soldiers.

And if civilians were killed, this was just by sort of mistakes.

So the infiltrators that came after, or maybe they chased soldiers that ran into the communities.

You understand very clearly from the intercepts.

They asked the commanders here we have just civilian cars on the road 232 and they get the answer kill all of them or kidnap bring to Gaza these civilians or we are burning that kibbutz.

Things are very very clear premeditated pre-planned and they are following the plan.

It doesn't mean that the infiltrators, so civilians who came from Gaza afterwards did not do horrific acts, but it's clear that there is a plan, and the plan, not just the invasion, not just the surprise, not just the deception, not just attacking military posts.

The plan is around the abduction and killing of civilians and the execution of, I would say, extreme brutality.

I don't know other words to describe these things, and document them and send them over the social media for the world to see.

Okay.

So one of the questions many people were asking that day was what the hell was he thinking, Sinoir?

Meaning, how on earth would these atrocities and broadcasting these atrocities, how on earth would these serve the Palestinian cause?

Because the comparison many made, me included, was to the Nazi genocide, industrial scale slaughtering of Jews.

The Nazis went to extraordinary lengths to disguise it, to hide it, to make sure the world didn't learn about it.

And this seemed to be the opposite.

So, based on all the documents that have been uncovered and what you have seen, what do you think Sinoir was thinking with this strategy?

Sinoir is not here to answer questions, but we do have many documents.

I cannot say that they all give one clear answer.

It may be all of them together.

But these are Hamas' Supreme Military Command documents and Sinoir's handwritten note.

And he's writing the answer, more to say, three answers, to explain why ordering these acts of extreme brutality, documenting them and sending them over social media.

And he says, we have three targets to this part of the attack.

One is to instill terror, hysteria, and massive fear in the hearts and minds of all Israelis.

So to create some kind of a collective shell shock.

He said it would be enough to break the self-confidence of the Israelis to let them feel unsafe at their home, even if their home is not by the Gaza Strip.

Second, he says, we need to create enthusiasm and motivation among the Arabs in Israel, Palestinians in Israel, and the Palestinians in the West Bank.

Now, just bear in mind, he wrote this in August 22.

This is a year and a few months after Guardians of the World War confrontation with Israel.

That war was the May of 21, right?

Yes.

And in that war, they created uprising and riots among Arabs in Israel and in the West Bank.

Okay, so May of 21, there's an 11-day war approximately between Israel and Hamas.

One of the unique features of that war, relative to previous Israel-Hamas wars, was that the Israeli Arab community for the first time started to protest.

I mean, more than protest.

There were riots in many of these Jewish Arab towns.

And you're saying that one of the things Hamas realizes we have the capacity to, first of all, have the West Bank join the fight and stir uprising from within Israel.

And now you're saying that all this documentation and broadcasting was in part an effort to provoke Israeli Arabs inside Israel to join the fight, but it seems to have had the opposite effect.

Well, it's not just documenting these horrible acts, but also explode tanks, show the terrorists of Hamas inside Israeli communities.

It shows success.

If I think I would come to anyone in the world on October 6th, 2023, and I would say, look, tomorrow you'll see such acts or such invasion into Israel successfully, nobody would believe.

They need this to make them believe that this is possible.

Now, this is perfectly synchronized with a recorded speech from the top military commander of Hamas Muhammad Def,

who says to the Arabs in Israel and the Palestinians in the West Bank, everyone should take a knife or take an axe and go and kill Jews.

And immediately afterwards, you have recorded speeches by leaders of Hamas in El Jazeera, basically saying the same.

And a recorded speech from Abu Ubaidah, the famous spokesperson for Hamas.

So we have a coordinated effort.

Now, the ability to ignite what he called the internal front was one achievement that Sinoir had from the 20, the May 21 war.

The other achievement was that the axis of resistance, the Jabal Mukawma, so Iran and Hezbollah,

they started to see Hamas not as a small partner colleague that needs financial help,

but as a very potent ally that they should treat in a different way.

We said one target was to instill fear and terror in the hearts of the Israelis.

The other one is to ignite the internal front.

And the third one, maybe the most important, that Sinoar and his lieutenants devoted so much to, was to convince Iran and Hezbollah to go to war with them.

This is the main thing because in May 22, just a few months before this was written, in a meeting of the small military council, this is the small secretive forum that he established in order to plan how to go to that attack.

He says, if we attack, we might be able to take down the Gaza division, the Israeli Gaza division, and cause a lot of damage.

But we should not confuse ourselves because our

goal is to eradicate the state of Israel.

And if we are able to convince the front, the Axis, to join us, we might be able to destroy the Jewish state or at least withdraw it decades to the past.

So his hope is that once his partners, the Axis, so mainly Hezbollah in Iran, once they see the images that he is successful, they would like to join in.

And on page three of that memo, he says, we should prepare ourselves that Hezbollah joins and we will go to the ultimate attack.

We go for the whole of Israel to destroy Israel.

This was the ultimate goal.

By broadcasting the Hamas atrocities, though, we now know, unlike in 2021, Sinoar failed to activate Israeli Arabs.

In fact, they seemed, they did express solidarity with Israel after October 7th.

And he failed to fully activate at least Hezbollah and Iran, at least in the immediate days.

And the West Bank.

And he failed to activate the West Bank.

So what did he misjudge there?

So first, if it's just about the first target, so to instill fear and lack of self-confidence in the hearts of the Israelis, I think he was analyzing or forecasting right

because to an extent, regretfully, it was successful.

It's a collective post-traumatic situation.

People went to sleep.

hundreds of kilometers from Gaza, went to sleep with knives because they dreamt that the Nuqba is coming to slaughter them.

It brought back the fears of the Holocaust, existential threats, and it broke this unwritten contract with the state and the people that this is the state of the Jews and the country will defend them.

And so to that extent, I think he was right.

What he got totally wrong was that he thought Hezbollah would join and they joined at first on a very low level.

So sort of like paying the Rebeguil because they promised him before they don't join him that day, but they might support him if he starts.

So this was the minimum.

He got only the minimum and a few days after when he saw that he's getting only the minimum he started cursing nasrallah he used horrible horrible words for not doing more and i think that to an extent it had the opposite effect on arabs in israel and palestinians in the west bank because they just didn't want anything to do with what they broadcast from there you know it they they abducted women and little children and

the parts of the leaders of the Axis, or Iran al-Hizbalah, they were convinced that this is just an Israeli fabrication that they kidnap children.

Meaning, they thought that, like, if it were true, it would be Hamas going too far.

Yeah, but they didn't believe, they thought it's Israelis fabricating this.

And then, when Hamas released them in the first deal in November 23, they were shocked.

They said they really did kidnap children.

So, they sort of thought of Hamas

as savages.

They thought that this is too much.

much.

Now, again, if he was calculating right, then he had a lot to lose.

And at the end, of course, he miscalculated.

And I'm sure that if he would be alive or if he would be seeing that all of this is coming, he might have second thoughts.

But he also knew that this can be happening only once, and he wanted to do everything for that day to be successful.

There's one area where he was successful, which was in activating the West.

I hate hate to say this.

It's so hard for me to say it, but I'm just going to say it.

Activating Hamas's support cells or sympathizers in the West internationally.

He flipped the script.

Sinoir basically shackled tens of thousands of Palestinians, civilians, to the train track and then fooled the world into blaming the train, which is Israel, which is Israel's response.

He completely flipped the narrative and drew this international outrage, which ultimately resulted in diplomatic isolation, isolation, some economic isolation, and this demonization of Israel.

Was that part of what he was trying to accomplish too, or that just kind of worked out in a way that he may not have planned for?

So in one meeting before the execution of the attack, someone is asking him, and what would happen if 30,000 Palestinians will be killed when Israel responds to this attack.

And he says,

well, imagine that there is an earthquake in Gaza and 30,000 are dead because of the earthquake.

What is this compared to the holy jihad?

So there are thoughts that this is a sacrifice that the Palestinian people will sacrifice and that this will lead to some kind of re-emerging of the Palestinian issue on the world stage.

And you quoted the essay by Ilan Benatal.

We'll link to this in the show notes.

Ilan wrote this piece for Medium soon after October 7th about the flipping of the script.

That basically says that this was not a miscalculation, meaning that the Israeli response was not a miscalculation.

It was the feature of the plan.

Hamas wanted this response.

Yeah, and so there's no vetting inside the protocols.

There's nothing against that.

But the New York Times had an interview with leaders of Hamas immediately after the attack, November, late October, November 23.

And my colleague Ben Habard is asking Khalil Ukaya, so the deputy of Sinoa, that he's dispatched to Docha shortly before the attack, and now is the leader of Hamas, the one that was targeted in Docha by Israeli Air Force.

And he asks him, you miscalculated.

And Khalil Ukhaya answers, no, we did not.

We knew that if we do something big, the reaction would be big.

We knew that this is a sacrifice that needs to be sacrificed.

Of course, they didn't ask the Palestinian people before they did that if they are willing to make that sacrifice.

But he says, we are Hamas, we are jihad, we are Qassam, we are not in charge of supplying the sewage and the health and the electricity services to the Gazans.

It's not our job.

We are in charge of jihad, and our purpose was to create a multi-front war against Israel, regional war, that will not just make the Israelis stay awake at night, but will make everybody in the Middle East not sleep another night peacefully again until the Palestinian issue is solved, according to their version.

So he says this is all pre-planned, but I think that possible calculation of them would be that Israel would go to major offense

and that as long as they hold tight in the tunnels, at the end the world would put enough pressure on Israel and the whole thing will end in the same place that all rounds of hostilities and fights with Hamas ended.

So Hamas stays, they have hostages, they can free the prisoners, and Israel cannot continue its fighting.

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Ronan, let's go back to the 10 Hamas protocols that were obtained by the IDF.

Again, remind us when that document was discovered by the IDF.

What are these documents and the time period they cover?

On the 31st of January 2024, Israeli commandos entered a tunnel under Hanyunes where Sinoar was hiding until a few hours before.

In the drawing, the map that they prepared for this tunnel, there's something called Room 6.

This is where Sinoar and his family and his bodyguards and a big metal safe were located.

And Sinoar, he heard in Israeli television, Sinoar had a habit to stop everything, his daily routine, every day at five minutes to eight in the evening because he was addicted to see Channel 12 news every day.

Every night in Israel, every night except for Shabbat, 8 p.m.

news on Channel 12, it's must-watch for Israelis, many Israelis.

And your point, Ronan, is that among its audience was Sinoar.

He was religiously loyal to watching the Channel 12 news because he wanted to keep his finger on the pulse.

He's a fluent Hebrew speaker, was.

He wanted to keep his finger on the pulse of where the Israeli dialogue was going.

Yeah, and he believed that Channel 12 represented the widest consensus among Israeli society that he needs to understand.

So in one of the news shows at eight, he heard that massive bulletproof bulldozers called D9

are hammering above his head in order to get and capture Sinoar.

He was the number one wanted, the mastermind of October 7 attack.

And he thought that this is odd because he did hear hammering above his head.

And then he thought, well, maybe if they are drilling above my head and they know that they are drilling above my head, maybe they know where I am.

So he picked up his bodyguards and his family and they ran away as soon as they could, a few hours before the disappointed Israeli commandos raided that hive of tunnels.

So they didn't find Sinoar, but they did find a safe with 4 million shekels in cash.

This is over a million dollars in cash, basically.

But in shekels, so 4 million.

Yes.

And they found a laptop.

air-gapped laptops, so not connected to the internet, which is one of the most common ways that Hamas stored their massive archives.

They print or they write, then they scan and then they store them on air-gapped computers, believing that Israeli intelligence that is super understanding the cyber hemisphere cannot penetrate something that is not connected to the net.

Unfortunately, in most cases, they were right.

The documents that we now have were not in the possession of Israeli intelligence before that.

This is a major collection flaw.

And in that computer, they found what I believe is the most important, historically important documents of the war.

These are 10 protocols of 10 meetings of the small military council of Hamas, the highest supreme military decision-making forum, starting July 21.

And the last one is August 23.

And later, they found the last protocol days from two days before the war.

And you see the planning, you see the deliberations, you see the targets, and you see an ongoing attempt by Sinouar and Mohammad Dev to get and convince the Hezbollah in Iran, so the axis of resistance to join them on the attack.

And to deceive Israel about Hamas's true intentions during this entire time period while preparing for the assault.

I had some sometimes high-tone discussions or interviews with sources and people from the military who said

there's no strategic deception here.

I think many Israelis that were high-ranking officials on October 7, there are many of them who are taking responsibility, who said we did wrong, we made mistakes.

Among others, it's our responsibility.

But most of them have really found it difficult to admit that the other side deceived them.

It's easier for them to say it's a conception.

We tricked ourselves, we made the mistake, it's settling it in our accord.

But what we see is the planning of massive strategic deception.

They say we do not get into the fights between Israel and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

We don't do anything following what they call the provocation of Itamar Benvir in the Holy Mountain.

We don't get into small conflicts, military conflicts, and we give the Israelis the sense that we are into calmness.

We want to settle.

We are taking the money from Qatar and this will convince the Israelis that we are not up to launch such a major assault.

So Hamas initially planned to carry out the attack in the fall of 22.

Yeah.

They obviously changed their plans.

Why?

So they're looking at basically two occasions every year.

One is Pesach, the other one is Chaget Ishrei, the high holidays.

They had the ongoing surveillance, what is happening in the Gaza front, how many tanks, how many soldiers, taking everything that any Israeli soldier put on social media and compiling quite a striking understanding of what the IDF is doing and how it's protecting and what are the best opportunities to strike.

It's either Pesach

or one of Osha Shana, Yom Kippur or Sukkot afterwards.

They are not fully ready in April 22, but they are reaching readiness in September of 22.

This is when Sinoa is writing this memo, this is like his last orders to the overall attack plan.

And then they decide not to attack.

Though they feel that they are in the highest level of readiness, it's not written specifically, but we understand that he still gives a chance to be able to convince Hezbollah and Iran to join him.

So from high holidays of 22 throughout the coming year, they invested massive efforts.

They had two senior envoys traveling, shuttling between Qatar, Lebanon, Tehran, Gaza.

One of them is Ismail Hania, who is the political leader of Hamas back then, who was killed by Israel later.

The other one is Khalil Khayyah, Abu Osama, who is now the leader of Hamas and was the deputy of Sinoar, and he is sent to speak with Hezbollah and with Iran, with Mohammad Ezadi, the POC with the Qutz force,

and tell him, listen, we are going to attack and we need your help.

So Iran's and Hezbollah help

to attack at the same day and help us with specific, even he gets, he gives even specific targets and specific aid they need on aerial bombardment, etc.

And he keeps on doing that and he fails in 22 and he fails again in 23 fails to recruit them to this they say we are all with you we are planning it we have our own plan to have a multi-front six front attack synchronized the same day against israel to eradicate the state of the jews but we are not yet ready and in 22 he decides to delay and in 23 he decides not to delay he feels that this is his last chance and why does he think it's his last chance he thinks first of all, he believes the announcement from the Israeli Ministry of Defense that the laser, the laser interceptors are going to be ready in 2024.

He believes that this will significantly reduce his ability to bomb Israeli communities.

And the other one, he believes that the defragmentation of the Israeli society and every and all the judicial overall and the protest and all of that,

he believes this could be a good time.

He gets his military intelligence to assess the readiness level of Israeli forces on the border.

And they tell him, listen, in spite of everything that we see in Israel, the level of preparedness was not damaged.

And also, we advise you not to attack the Israelis, especially in this kind of time.

The Israelis are expected to react with even more massive, stronger force against against you.

And he doesn't take this advice.

And they decide to attack.

And they believe that Sibhatora, the last holiday, is their last chance in 2023.

And otherwise, they need to delay in a year.

Then they might be a laser or the political circumstances are going to be different.

And they go for the attack.

To what degree were Hamas's political leaders in Qatar informed of the plan?

Meaning, what was the dynamic between Hamas Doha and Hamas Gaza?

What is very strongly substantiated in the protocols is that this whole claims that there is like a political bureau in Docha that is not aware what is happening in Gaza, that's sometimes in contradictive way, that is more moderate, that is not involved in the military activity, it's all false.

Not just Ismail Hania was aware of what they call a Mashurul Kabir, the big plan.

That's the code name for the attack.

His son was involved in that.

They have encrypted video communication conferences between docha and gaza where they announce them and in a specific moment in the last protocol the last of the 10 in august 23 they say we informed rais al-haraka so ismail

they informed him this is for history we informed him and then they say by informing him we see a consent So basically they say, I'm telling you that I'm going to do something horrible tomorrow.

I'm telling you this.

I don't don't give you even the time to react, but I'm noting to myself the fact that I told you means that you agree.

And I think they wanted sort of to put themselves in the right place that it was not just their decision because they understood the historical magnitude of that day.

But in the previous two years, Hania is going to speak with the Iranians and telling them about the great plan.

And he's speaking with Nasrallah and telling him about that.

So the front is aware, Hania is in the loop.

he knows everything,

and he knows about the date.

Sinoa wanted to ignite regional war.

He failed at the beginning.

Nasrallah,

only mindly, very on a very low level, followed and created some military friction with Israel that had Israel to like split its forces.

But at the end, even he was not alive anymore, he was successful.

He was able to ignite regional war.

What he did not see is, of course, what Israel did in Gaza and the Israeli success against the other part of the Axis, against Hezbollah and Iran.

And so while this is the tale that winged the dog, and he was successful in that, he ignited regional war, it ended with the total collapse of the Eastern Hemisphere of this radical Axis.

Yeah, he ignited a regional war.

which he was successful in, but it was a war that Israel won.

Exactly.

Which was not part of his plan.

He saw the Israelis in constant friction.

You know,

every two years they had a round of hostilities.

They perfected themselves.

They were much more successful in preventing Israeli infiltration.

We talked about this in one of the episodes in the past.

In preventing Israeli from Israel from recruiting agents, etc.

He saw his success.

He didn't understand that Israel didn't have the same kind of friction with Hezbollah.

So Hezbollah didn't understand how deeply Israel penetrated its ranks.

He thought that it's going to be the same, and he was encouraged by his success, but it just didn't see the picture.

And of course, he basically afterwards, Nasrallah and Khamenai did the same strategic mistakes when thinking that Israel would not surprise them with all-out attack.

They had the same conception and died well.

Yeah.

So I want to go back to Sinwar's stated goals.

So just create a regional war that you talked about, that Israel ultimately won.

And then also, was he explicit about disrupting Saudi normalization with Israel?

Yeah.

And one of the protocols, they say that this is the Saudi, I think they call it Muabara, so conspiracy.

They say this is a conspiracy to take the Palestinian issue off the table of the world forever.

And this is one of the things that they see as threat, and they want to reintroduce the Palestinian topic and not let anyone sleep peacefully at night until this is done.

Now, there's also the question of the prisoners.

This is extremely important because

Sinoar told the families of the prisoners, the Palestinian prisoners.

Of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons.

Yeah.

Some of them, his comrades from the same cell for decades, he promised that he will release them.

You know, Sinoar tried to sabotage the Shalid deal, the deal that...

Yeah, that got him released.

Yeah.

Yeah, because he was afraid that this will sort of tarnish his image as, it's called Amir al-Astra, so the king or the emir of the prisoners.

And suddenly you are being released and you leave your comrades behind.

And, you know, Hamas, throughout that decade, previous decade, had from 2014, hey, two bodies of Israeli soldiers and two live Israelis that found their ways to Hamas captivity.

But Sinua told everybody that he has two Israeli live soldiers and he will be able to replace the live soldiers for the prisoners, the heavy prisoners.

They got 1,000 Palestinian prisoners for Shalit.

Here you have four live Israelis, he claimed.

So you get all of them.

And Israel knew that the two soldiers are not alive.

It was sensitive to admit to some extent, but Israel knew the truth.

And they knew that Sinoar knows the truth, but he's lying to his own people.

But then years passed, and he's not fulfilling what he promised.

And he has, you know, the families of the prisoners, some of them from the 80s in Israeli prisons in harsh conditions, and he's under pressure.

So it's a combination of things, but I think that above all, as we see from his writings and his behavior, as time passes, he is no longer just a religious follower of Allah's orders, but he believes more and more that he has a duty in that theater.

that he's not just a believer, he is not part of many, but he is the one that that needs to execute Allah's order by himself.

Based on these goals that we now know, Sinwar's plan completely failed.

And yet in many corners of the world, there's this perception that Hamas was successful.

Why do you think that is?

Some of the things that he predicted may be as a tactic to achieve a much bigger goal, so to instill fear in many Israelis' hearts and minds, breaking self-confidence.

In that, he was successful.

And Israelis know every Israeli who is here, he knows what I'm talking about.

And it's yet to be seen in years of researches and psychological examinations, what are the results of that.

People who saw the video, some of them, you cannot do an undo to a video that you saw.

And to many people, and you know, I've spent the first six months of the war, except for the Battlefield in Gaza, I spent the nights watching the videos because of the research that we have done with them and I didn't let anyone get close to them or to my room nobody was allowed in because I was afraid that this will harm someone's heart someone's soul and it's really horrible so on that scale I think he was successful and I think that people saw the shock of the Israeli defeat that day of that specific battle on October 7 was in many cases left such an impression on many people around the world that they failed to see what happened after and how Jesus connected.

Because what happened with Hezbollah, with Iran, is not disconnected, it's a result of that.

Everything is a result of October 7th.

This is the watershed moment that changed everything.

And also, the next phase, what would happen in the next phase in Gaza?

I think that historians will see this as the judgment.

Gaza, of course, militarily Israel won but it's not just the counting of bodies of hamas terrorists but it's also what will happen at the end because hamas were as he said so if 30 000 people are dying in an earthquake what is this compared to jihad if he's willing to sacrifice 30

then he's willing to sacrifice more Sadat said, and I think he really meant that before the October 6th War, 1973, that he's willing to sacrifice 1 million

Anuar Saddad, the president of Egypt.

And in this kind of dictatorship tyranny regime, if you are the person who is in control, you can make such a decision.

So I think he was willing to do that.

And how this ends, you know, one of the previous rounds of small-scale war with Hamas ended with what Israel saw as a victory.

the guardians of the wall in May 21.

And then you get a picture of Sinoar on the ruins of his house, sitting on a couch.

So there's only one couch.

All the rest is totally ruined.

But Sinoir is sitting on a couch and he's smiling.

That means that he is still in control.

He's still standing.

Now, Sinoir cannot stand.

He will not stand anywhere ever.

But the next month will be seen as crucial for historians how this is going to unfold.

Where is this going to end?

It's not yet the end of it.

All right, Renan, this was a tour de force.

Thank you for taking us through this.

We will leave it there.

And I agree with you, the story is not over, which is partly why this conversation and the ones going forward are not over.

There's still a lot to understand and to make sense of.

And we'll look forward to having you back as we continue to try to navigate through this.

Yeah, but we need to remember that we are speaking now.

This is the first episode I'm here with you speaking after the release of 20 live Israeli hostages.

And it's I said to you before that there will not be a page turner to a better future of this region before they are released.

It's so such a wonderful news.

Jana, my wife, and I had many of the parents and family members of hostages coming to our place to ask for advice, to ask for, they were so sad and traumatized and miserable and felt such inconfidence with what the administration was telling them.

And every time they left, Jana and I looked at ourselves and said, what are the chances that this mother or father or brother will ever

see

their family member, son, child, ever again?

And there's some happy note that they came back.

Yeah.

This is just so great.

And I hope that this will be the page channel to a better day for this region, for us, for us all.

Thank you for that.

That's right.

It's the first episode you've been on since the deal.

So hopefully you continue to return return on high notes.

Thanks, Deb.

Call Me Back is produced and edited by Elon Benatar.

Arc Media's executive producer is Adam James Levin-Aretti.

Sound and video editing by Martin Huergo and Marian Khalis Burgos.

Our director of operations, Maya Rockoff.

Research by Gabe Silverstein.

Our music was composed by Yuval Semo.

Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.