Israel established an elite task force in the wake of the October 7 massacre to track down and kill or capture every single Hamas terrorist who participated in or planned the attack, from foot soldiers who breached the border fence to the senior commanders who orchestrated it, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.

The unit, code-named NILI, an acronym for “Netzach Yisrael Lo Yeshaker,” operates under the principle that no victim of the massacre would be forgotten and no perpetrator placed beyond reach.

“The clear message to all future enemies is to think again about the price of a terrorist operation like that,” Shalom Ben Hanan, a former senior official in the Shin Bet, told the Journal.

NILI has compiled a list of “thousands of names” of terrorists involved in the massacre, the Journal reported, many of whom have already been crossed off. According to the report, no individual on the list is too insignificant or too powerful to be targeted. The Journal describes a man who drove a tractor through the Gaza border fence on October 7 being killed in an Israeli airstrike two years later, while walking down a narrow urban street, alongside the recent assassination of Izz ad-Din al-Haddad, whom IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir called “one of the chief perpetrators of the October 7 massacre and the head of Hamas’s military wing.”

Current and former Israeli officials told the Journal that once two pieces of evidence are found establishing that an individual took part in the attack, they are marked for death without trial. The methods used to identify and locate targets include facial recognition programs run against videos that the terrorists themselves posted to social media on and after October 7, cellphone location data, and the interrogation of Gazan detainees.

Beyond Gaza, the task force has also assassinated Hamas leaders in Iran and Lebanon, in operations consistent with the unit’s founding premise that no geography places a perpetrator out of reach.

The acronym itself carries deliberate historical weight. NILI was the name of a Jewish espionage network during World War I that provided critical intelligence to British forces fighting against the Ottoman rulers of Israel. More than a century later, a modern-day NILI is operating on behalf of the Jewish state to hunt down its most recent enemies.

The unit was established by the Shin Bet along with the Mossad in late 2023, weeks after the October 7 attack. Ahron Bregman, an Israeli political scientist at King’s College London who spent six years in the Israeli army, told France 24 at the time that “Shin Bet along with Mossad formed a special operations centre tasked with tracking down and killing members of Hamas that entered Israel and massacred Israelis on 7 October.” He added that the inclusion of Mossad meant the assassinations would not be restricted to Gaza but would extend to Hamas figures sheltering in countries such as Qatar and Turkey.

According to the Journal report, the task force has at times prioritized terrorists whose deaths would console the family members of victims, in what one security official described as “treatment for the soul.”

Michael Milstein, a former senior Israeli military intelligence officer on Palestinian affairs, told the Journal that “revenge is an important part of the discourse” in the Middle East. “It is about how serious anyone in your environment sees you,” he explained. “Unfortunately, this is the language of this neighborhood.”

The task force has continued its work even as the wider war has wound down. The Journal reported that since the ceasefire with Hamas began, NILI has been reduced to a small number of operatives who pass information on targets to commanders responsible for ongoing operations in Gaza. The list does not shrink on its own, and the unit’s mandate, by design, does not expire with a ceasefire.

Some of the October 7 perpetrators are not slated for assassination. Israeli forces captured some of them alive during the war, including several minors. These terrorists are being held in isolated prison wings under strict security measures, with some reportedly responsible for as many as 30 Israeli deaths each. Israel has worked to set up a special war crimes tribunal to try them.

Top targets for the unit have historically included Marwan Issa and Yahya Sinwar, both suspected of orchestrating the October 7 massacre. Both have since been eliminated, along with a long line of senior Hamas figures whose names rotated to the top of the list in turn.

Not all observers of the Israeli security establishment view the strategy uncritically. Journalist Yossi Melman, a longtime author on Israeli intelligence, has criticized the campaign, arguing that the strategy of assassinations “doesn’t solve anything” and represents an attempt by Israeli security services to redeem themselves after being humiliated by the success of the Hamas attacks. Israeli officials, by contrast, argue that the operation serves a strategic deterrent function distinct from any single target’s value: future enemies, they say, must understand that an attack on Israel will be answered not only at the level of organizations and infrastructure but at the level of every individual who pulled a trigger.

(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)