Secret military document found: It's all revealed

Secret military document found: It's all revealed

The manual was found after Hamas militants launched a surprise attack on Israel on October 7. The Washington Post, which obtained the manual, said that in the manual the organization reveals their combat skills and how to behave when facing the enemy.

This manual was found in the possession of one of the Hamas militants. It was issued in 2022 and contains instructions for handling certain weapons, instructions for killing with a knife, but also the weak points of the Israeli army. It was prepared for various units of Hamas soldiers, and it can be assumed that anti-tank units, engineers, snipers, infantry and tunnel specialists received them.

The first page of the manual reads: "This is a secret military document. It should be kept in a safe place... It is forbidden to move with it except by order."

On the back of the manual is a picture of Abdullah Yusuf Azam, a Palestinian Islamic jihadist and scholar. He was a mentor to Saudi militant Osama bin Laden, the long-time leader of al-Qaeda.

"If that's a figurehead, a symbol they look up to, then I better understand their behavior that we saw on October 7," said Michael Milstein, former head of the Palestine Department and Israel's military intelligence agency, who studied the manual.

Experts, who had a chance to see the manual, said it looked authentic and was similar to documents found by Israeli forces after the Hamas attack.

The office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed the authenticity. Other Hamas documents found contained maps and detailed plans to attack several kibbutzim around Gaza. They stated that Hamas intends to kill and capture civilians.

The manual obtained by the Post contains, among other things, instructions for operating North Korea's F"7 rocket launcher. North Korea has said it has never given the weapon to Hamas. Hamas officials in Gaza and Beirut did not respond to The Washington Post's requests for comment on the revelations.

Mkhaimar Abusada, an analyst at Al-Azhar University in Gaza, said that in previous years Hamas could easily send explosives and rockets from Egypt to Gaza. However, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi is fighting these smuggling routes.

"Honestly, I don't know how they kept the ability to build their military capabilities," Abusada said, adding that the attack on Israel was led by elite Nukhba Hamas' special forces unit, who were trained in Iran and then trained other Hamas fighters in Gaza.

Hamas militants entered Israel from Gaza using parachutes, motorcycles and trucks, and the attacks were carried out by small specialized units. Apparently, they followed the instructions from the found manual.

"We saw them behaving like professional soldiers," an Israeli commander at the Israel Weapons Research Institute said on Friday. The scout manual said it was best to stab the enemy in the neck near the collarbones, spine and armpits.

The Israeli military said it had collected hundreds of documents and other material, from cellphones and other communications equipment to cameras and intelligence reports, following the Hamas attack.

Many of these documents were published on the "South First Responders" channel on the Telegram communication platform. The owners of that channel did not want to say how they got the documents because it would jeopardize the security of their sources. The bodies of each slain Hamas militant are first inspected by Israeli pyrotechnicians.

"They came fully prepared. They had documents, maps and instructions," said Yossi Landau, a member of the health organization Zaka, which was hired to remove the bodies of dead and killed Hamas militants.

The document, which contained plans for an attack on Kibbutz Mefalsim, stated how many security guards were defending the kibbutz, information on how far away certain important points in the kibbutz were, and told the militants to "capture soldiers and civilians."

According to documents obtained by the Post, Hamas militants tasked with attacking the kibbutz gate were to distract Israeli security forces while Hamas pyrotechnicians were to blow up the rear gate.

"The group occupies the attention of the kibbutz until the rest of the fighters arrive," the attack plan reads. However, Israeli forces fighting Hamas in Mefalsim said the militants never received any reinforcements.

"They knew where the gate was, where the generators were," Jarden Reskin, a landscape architect and a member of Mefalsim's volunteer security force, said.

"We think we were very lucky. We did our part, we did it well, but we were very lucky," Reskin added.