Hamas terrorists captured during and after the October 7 attacks in Israel told their Israeli interrogators that they were explicitly ordered by their commanders in Gaza to kill and capture as many civilians as possible, including women and children if possible.

One of the six men, all of whom participated in the attacks, said they were promised $10,000 and an apartment for each civilian they managed to drag back to Gaza. Edited videos of the men making the claims under interrogation by Israeli officials were released by the Israeli government on Monday and published by the Jerusalem Post.

The men said their orders were to overrun and capture a military outpost at Sufa and then turn to the kibbutzim filled with civilians in the next phase and “cleanse” them as one terrorist put it.

“The instructions were to kidnap women and children,” one of the men said. “When we finished,” another Hamas operative said, “we burned two houses.” Said another: “The orders regarding civilians was killing the men and capturing the women, the elderly and the children.”

Another man described how his commander rebuked him for “wasting” bullets on the body of a woman who had already been killed by the assailants, and yet another described how he and his cohorts murdered an unarmed man they surprised that Saturday morning watering his plants.

At the Be’eri kibbutz, where more than 100 people were murdered, one of the kidnappers said they captured a young girl of around 15 or 16 years old. “Some of them said to shoot her,” he said, referring to his accomplices. “Others said don’t shoot her, kidnap her. They took pictures with her. Someone took a selfie with her and put her on his motorcycle.”

A member of one group of fighters described how they encountered a family who managed to lock themselves in a safe room with iron covering the only window. They used an explosive to create a small hole in the window and suggested that they “choke them with smoke,” but a frightened young woman opened the window before they did so. When she did, one of the terrorists fired at least ten rounds through the window, killing two young women, their parents, and a small family dog.

All of the men agreed with their interrogators that the Islamic faith does not allow for the sort of crimes against women and children that were perpetrated that day and two of them were critical of the Hamas leadership. “They tricked us,” one young man said the Hamas leaders. “They fooled us. Those from Hamas. They sit in their homes and left us here. They left us inside of Israel. … Those in Turkey and Qatar, they speak in the name of al Aqsa and the Muslims and they stay there while they sent us here.”