Written orders carried by Hamas fighters sent to attack Israeli towns and settlements last weekend contained the same chilling command: Kill as many people as possible.

Documents recovered from the bodies of dead militants at the sites of attacks that killed more than 1,300 Israelis point to a deliberate strategy to massacre civilians, Israeli officials said.

The similarity of the orders given to attack teams, along with videos posted by the attackers themselves, eyewitness testimony, and the scale of civilian killings in multiple locations—at least 1,000 in total—suggest that the massacre wasn’t a byproduct of the attack but a central objective.