When the remains of Ran Gvili, the last Israeli hostage in Gaza, were finally retrieved, it marked the end of an agonising three-year ordeal that began with the deadliest attack on Jewish people since the Holocaust. Yet one question remain: did we really understand what we were actually dealing with?
The warning was there. Two years before October 7, 2023, Hamas held a conference that laid out in extraordinary detail exactly what they wanted to do. Almost no one paid attention – it has been virtually ignored by the international media, analysts and genocide scholars alike.
In September 2021, Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar sponsored an event titled “Promise of the Hereafter.” It concluded with a 20-point plan for administering the land of Israel after its “liberation” – covering everything from currency, sewage systems and land seizure to the fate of Jewish civilians. Sinwar's statement to the attendants was unambiguous: “We are sponsoring this conference because it is in line with our assessment that victory is nigh.”
The conference's vision was explicit: the “liberation” of Palestine and “disappearance” of Israel “from the sea to the river”. The chant heard on the streets of Western cities today uses Hamas's own words – rearranged for the sake of a cheap rhyme.
This was not idle rhetoric. The conference was organised by the Promise of the Hereafter Institute, established in 2014 specifically to prepare for the moment of “liberation”. It was the blueprint of a plan that Hamas tried to carry out nine years later.
Hamas documents captured separately and published last year reveal that Sinwar wanted to destroy Israel in a single coordinated assault. What we witnessed on October 7, 2023 was the opening move of a war that was meant to be far larger. Hamas had delayed the attack by a year trying to coordinate with Iran and Hezbollah. When the US deployed aircraft carriers to the Eastern Mediterranean within days, the wider war was stopped before it could begin.
It was the moment many believed Israel was at risk of being destroyed – a war on all fronts, with coordinated attacks from Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq and Syria. What prevented that was American military power, not international diplomacy or Islamist restraint.
But what did the blueprint from Hamas’s earlier conference actually propose for the Jewish population of Israel had they succeeded? Point 15 spells out the bleak options for the survivors of the “defunct (Jewish) state” – ranging from death to expulsion to forced labour. Fighters, a broad category in what would be a battle for survival, “must be killed”; those who try to flee “can be left alone or prosecuted”; and “a peaceful individual who gives himself up can be [either] integrated or given time to leave.”
Point 16 is particularly chilling. Educated Jews “should not be allowed to leave” but be retained “for some time” to extract their knowledge and expertise. This is nothing but a plan for forced labour, categorised by profession. The document identifies doctors, engineers, and technology experts specifically for this special treatment.
The document sanitises genocide and mass expulsion in bureaucratic language – “retained,” “integrated," “prosecuted.” But read it against Hamas's charter, which explicitly calls for the destruction of Israel, and against what actually happened on October 7, and the euphemisms dissolve entirely. “Prosecuted” means executed, because Hamas does not conduct fair trials and we have seen the videos of how they prosecute fellow Palestinians. “Retained” means imprisoned. “Integrated” can only mean kept alive only until their usefulness runs out, forced conversion or second-class status. There is no other category. There is no category that ends with Jews living freely in Palestine.
Point 18 extends the ambition far beyond destroying Israel. The plan promises to cleanse not only Palestine but “the Arab and Islamic homeland” of “hypocrite scum” – anyone across the Muslim world seen as insufficiently committed to Hamas's vision. This could encompass Palestinian Authority officials, Abraham Accords signatories, and any Arab leader who has cooperated with Israel or advocated coexistence. The term for hypocrite – munafiq – is not casual. In Islamic tradition it does not mean disagreement. It means apostasy, which for Islamists carries only one punishment.
Point 8 assumes international cooperation in all of this, specifically that Palestine would succeed Israel at the UN and claim its treaty rights under the Vienna Convention. They anticipated the international community would simply accommodate them. Looking at the world’s reaction to October 7, it is hard to say they were entirely wrong.
Under international law, proving genocide requires establishing intent. This document is that intent. Not a loose aspiration or revolutionary posturing but a 20-point administrative blueprint for the worst crimes, sponsored personally by the man who planned October 7, drafted two years before he carried it out.
The bureaucratic tone is not incidental. Discussing sewage systems and currency alongside the systematic elimination and expulsion of a people is precisely how atrocities get planned. History has shown us this before.
The conference proceedings were publicly reported at the time. This document was not secret. It was not buried in classified intelligence files. It was available and it was ignored. Israeli intelligence reportedly dismissed statements like these as bravado rather than credible threats. That was 2021. Even now, after October 7, the document remains largely unexamined by genocide scholars, analysts and the international media.
The real question is why, when a terrorist organisation told us exactly what it intended to do, we refused to listen. The harder question, as the world now debates Gaza's future and Hamas's role within it, is whether we are finally prepared to take them at their word.
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