Israel Targets Oct. 7 Terrorists

Revenge is a dish best served cold.

For the last two and a half years since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 massacre, the Israel Defense Force has been systematically targeting terrorists involved in the war crime – the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust, according to a May 21 Wall Street Journal (WSJ) report.

The elite task force, abbreviated as NILI – an acronym of the Biblical verse Netzach Israel lo yishaker,. meaning “the eternity of Israel will not lie” – comes from 1 Samuel 15:29. Adding to its gravitas, the acronym was also the name of a famous World War I espionage network that operated in Ottoman Palestine. The storied designation implies none of the civilian, military and police victims of the bloodbath will be forgotten.

“The clear message to all future enemies is to think again about the price of a terrorist operation like that,” said Shalom Ben Hanan, a former senior official in the Shin Beit Clali (General Security Service).

NILI’s target bank includes “thousands of names” of Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists involved in the massacre, the WSJ reported. The list includes all Gazans who were identified as having crossed the border on Oct. 7, as well as all Hamas leaders involved in orchestrating the mass murder, during which some 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken hostage, mostly civilians. Not all those on the marked-for-death list are affiliated with terror groups; some joined the invasion of the Gaza Strip border cities and kibbutzim on their own accord, keen to loot and kill.

Hundreds of Hamas activists have already been eliminated, according to the WSJ. No individual is too insignificant to be targeted. The New York newspaper describes a man who drove a tractor through the border fence being killed in an air strike two years afterward while walking down an alley in the Gaza Strip.

The most recent assassination was the May 26 killing of Mohammed Odeh, the new head of Hamas’ military wing and a key figure in the Oct. 7, 2023 attack. His death followed 11 days after the May 15 killing of Izz ad-Din al-Haddad, whom IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Eyal Zamir described as “one of the chief perpetrators of the Oct. 7 massacre and the head of Hamas’ military wing.”

Known by his nom de guerre Abu Suhaib, in June 2025 al-Haddad became the fourth Hamas leader in the Gaza Strip to be eliminated. Extremely cautious, that Friday at 7:45 p.m. he made a fatal mistake: emerging above ground to an apartment in the heart of Gaza City to meet his family, he was targeted by a pinpoint airstrike. His wife and daughter were killed alongside him, according to eyewitness accounts. In some reports, six or seven others died in the strike.

Previously, al-Haddad’s sons, Suhaib and Mu’min, and his son-in-law, Mahmoud Abu Hasira, were also eliminated.

According to current and former Israeli officials, NILI requires two pieces of evidence linking an individual to the Oct. 7 massacre to mark him for an extra-judicial death. Methods used to identify those terrorists include facial recognition software based on videos posted on social media, cellphone location data, and the interrogation of Gazan detainees.

While most of the assassinations have been carried in the Gaza Strip, the NILI task force has also targeted Hamas leaders in Iran and Lebanon.

“Revenge is an important part of the discourse” in the Middle East, said Michael Milstein, a former senior Israeli military intelligence officer on Palestinian affairs.

“It is about how serious anyone in your environment sees you,” he explained. “Unfortunately, this is the language of this neighborhood.”

One security official told the WSJ that the task force prioritized terrorists whose deaths would console victims’ family members, in what they called “treatment for the soul.”

One such case is Ali Sami Muhammad Shakr, a platoon commander in Hamas’s elite Nukhba Force who took part in kidnapping hostages Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Alon Ohel, Eliya Cohen and Or Levy from a roadside bomb shelter near Kibbutz Re’im.

After Shakr was killed on April 11 in a strike on a Hamas Nukhba cell in central Gaza, the IDF posted images showing him sticking his head out of a car window while driving into Israel during the attack. The caption: “Eliminated.”

Lt Col. (ret.), Rachel VanLandingham, a former judge advocate in the U.S. Air Force and expert on military law, told the WSJ that while Israel’s campaign “feels retributive,” there is “nothing inherently wrong with prioritizing people on a target list as long as they’re belligerents.”