In coded doc, Hamas instructed terrorists to kill civilians, take captives – report
Document found in vehicle used by Gaza-ruling terror group in devastating attack said to include code words for massacring people or using those taken captive as human shields
A coded document found in a vehicle used by Hamas terrorists in their shock assault on Israel showed they were instructed to massacre civilians and take captives, according to a television report Saturday.
The Kan public broadcaster reported that the document was recovered at Kibbutz Re’im, outside of which at least 260 people were killed and an unknown number taken hostage at a music festival when the Palestinian terror organization launched a devastating attack on Israel from the Gaza Strip.
War erupted after Hamas’s October 7 massacre, which saw at least 1,500 terrorists burst across the border into Israel from the Gaza Strip by land, air and sea, killing over 1,300 people and seizing 150-200 hostages of all ages under the cover of a deluge of thousands of rockets fired at Israeli towns and cities. The vast majority of those killed as gunmen seized border communities were civilians — men, women, children and the elderly. Entire families were executed in their homes, and over 260 were slaughtered at an outdoor festival, many amid horrific acts of brutality by the terrorists, in what US President Joe Biden has highlighted as “the worst massacre of the Jewish people since the Holocaust.”
The Kan report said that among the commands included in the document were to slaughter all captives, which was given the code word for “black” in Arabic, and “bus” to use those taken captive as human shields.
Other code words — which the broadcaster said were apparently meant to be used by the terrorists to communicate with Hamas operatives who did not take part in the attack — included “military vehicle” for the release of captives, “civilian vehicle” to relay how many captives were taken and “red” to report that Israel had caught members of the Gaza-ruling Islamist group.
Some of the instructions included in the document were reportedly not coded, such as the command to burn homes, cars and fields.
The report came a day after Kan revealed a different document left behind by a Hamas terrorist in southern Israel that ordered terrorists to kill as many civilians as possible in their takeover of Kibbutz Alumim.
The Arabic-language document instructed the terrorist squad tasked with raiding the kibbutz to maximize killings, take hostages, fend off security forces, and wait for further orders, according to the report.
On Saturday, NBC News reported on additional documents recovered from terrorists showed extensive Hamas plans to target an elementary school and a youth center, kill “as many people as possible” and take hostages quickly into Gaza from Kibbutz Sa’ad.
The “top secret” documents reported by NBC included orders for two terror squads to infiltrate the kibbutz near Gaza, “search the Bnei Akiva youth center,” “search the old Da’at school,” “collect hostages,” and “kill as many people as possible.”
Other instructions included raiding “the dental office, the supermarket, the dining hall,” an Israel Defense Forces source told NBC. “The level of specificity would cause anyone in the intelligence field’s jaw to drop.”
“I’ve never seen this kind of detailed planning” for a mass terror attack, an unnamed IDF official told the network.
Additional, detailed attack plans were found for Gaza-area communities including Kfar Aza, Nahal Oz and Alumim, showing how Hamas gathered extensive intelligence on every Israeli community targeted for attack on October 7 and gave clear instructions to target women and children, according to the report.
The documents, combined with footage obtained from terrorists’ body cameras, interviews with survivors and eyewitnesses, and firsthand testimonies from security forces and first responders in the aftermath of the devastation, pointed to an extensively planned and coordinated Hamas operation to target and kill civilians, including women, children, and elderly people.
Authorities and volunteers continue to work to locate and identify the remains of those slaughtered in Gaza border towns by the terrorists.
Troops have been collecting items from terrorists’ bodies, vehicles, and belongings and have found things like a flag of the Islamic State jihadist group on the vest of a terrorist killed during an assault on Kibbutz Sufa, near the Gaza border, as well as religious items, documents and pamphlets with attack plans and schedules, and intelligence information like the number of residents in a given Israeli community.
Following the massacres, Israel declared war on Hamas and has since been pounding Gaza with airstrikes, saying it is targeting terrorist infrastructure and all areas where Hamas operates or hides.
The Hamas-run health ministry has reported 2,329 Palestinians have been killed and another 9,042 have been wounded in Israeli retaliatory airstrikes in Gaza.
Israeli forces have also killed some 1,500 Hamas terrorists who infiltrated into its territory since last Saturday and have captured an unspecified number of them alive.
