The horrors of October 7th in the border kibbutzim close to the Gaza Strip were planned from scratch. They did not mature in the heat of the operation, nor were they the work of lone wolves, but were carefully planned by the Ezzedin al-Kassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas. I’m trying it documents labeled ‘top secret’ found in a vehicle used by Palestinian commandos and abandoned near Kibbutz Reim, a short distance from the barrier. And broadcast by the Israeli public television Kan. Today the Israeli air force eliminated the person responsible for one of the massacres, the one at Kibbutz Nirim, in Gaza. This is Billal al-Kedra, commander in the Khan Yunes area (south of the Strip) of the ‘Nukhba’, the elite Hamas unit. On the morning of the attack, Hamas military chief Mohammed Deif, released a short video in which he illustrated its aims, claiming among other things that his militiamen had received orders “not to kill women and children”. But in the same hours, a few kilometers away, those same men were indulging in brutal massacres of even the most defenseless.
«Your unit’s task is to conquer Kibbutz Alumim with the objective of cause as many victims as possible», we read in the document from the military wing of Hamas sent to the Israeli broadcaster. «You will also have to take hostages, at a later stage you will receive other orders». Subsequently, the same unit was tasked with “scouring the kibbutz” to ensure that there were no more hotbeds of resistance and “guarding the perimeter” to prevent a possible Israeli counterattack. So in Alumim Hamas hoped to cause as many civilian victims as possible and take as many hostages as it could. To facilitate operations – according to the document sent to Kan television – the front line men had developed a transmission code with their superiors who remained in Gaza in the command rooms. This code, according to the TV station, envisaged in black and white various scenarios including: the killing of hostages; the kidnapping of hostages; the use of hostages as human shields; the burning of homes, cars and fields.
In the context of this direction of a general nature they had also been agreed code words to be used during operations. ‘Black’ meant the killing of hostages, ‘Red’ meant their capture. ‘Bus’ was the use of hostages as human shields. ‘Military vehicle’ meant the release of hostages, ‘civilian vehicle’ indicated the number of people captured. A few days ago, in a television interview, Hamas number 2, Sallah al-Aruri, declared that Ezzedin al-Kassam’s men had concentrated on conquering an important military base and that the massacres of civilians had been conducted by masses of disorganized people who arrived from Gaza after seeing the gaps opened in the border barrier. The documents published by Kan indicate instead that those massacres had been planned.