How Israel wants to hunt down the terrorists behind the October 7 attacks

Israeli military accelerates hunt for October 7 terrorists. The Mossad and Shin Bet, the country’s foreign and domestic intelligence agency, have formed a special unit tasked with hunting down and killing members of the Hamas commandos who led a deadly attack in southern Israel two weeks ago, according to several Israeli news sites.

The unit is expected to be named after the underground Jewish organization Nili, which operated during World War I under the Ottoman occupation of the region, the Jerusalem Post reported. This is an abbreviation of a Hebrew phrase that can be translated as “The Lord of Israel will not lie.”

Operation Wrath of God, 1972.

Local media indicate that the group’s goal will be to eliminate all Nukbha attackers, members of Hamas commandos who took part in the deadly October 7 attack.

This new unit is reminiscent of Operation Wrath of God, launched by Prime Minister Golda Meir in 1972 following the Palestinian terrorist attack during the 1972 Munich Olympics against the Israeli delegation. A commando called “Kidon” (“Bayonet” in Hebrew), consisting of members of the Mossad Action service, was created to destroy the direct or indirect perpetrators of the massacre that led to the death of 11 Israeli athletes.

The targets of the operation included members of the Palestinian terrorist group Black September, which carried out the deadly attack, as well as representatives of the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization), which was responsible for the operation. This went on for more than twenty years.

This unit, called Nili, whose missions would be both tactical and reconnaissance, would operate independently of other IDF command and control units. The latter are currently paying more attention to neutralizing the cells responsible for the strikes, as well as the terrorists considered the most important in Hamas, located in the Gaza Strip, i24news reports.

Terrorists have already attacked

Several key players in Hamas’s military wing have already been killed in air raids carried out by the Israeli army as part of its counter-offensive. According to the Israeli army, Muhammad Qatmash, a senior leader of the Hamas rocket network, was killed this Sunday.

The IDF has already announced the death of several Nukbha commanders in strikes since the Hamas attack two weeks ago, including Billal al-Kedr, who led the Khan Yunis battalion, and Ali Kadhi, a company commander. Last Wednesday, the IDF said it had killed more than 10 Nukhba members while pursuing known terrorists in the Gaza Strip.

As a likely ground offensive approaches, Israel has warned that all Hamas members face death, but two alleged masterminds of the Oct. 7 attacks are at the top of its target list: Hamas military commander Muhammad Deif and political leader Yahya Sinwar. Since October 7, the Israeli government has issued repeated warnings to Hamas leaders. “Every member of Hamas is a dead man,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said days after the Oct. 7 massacre.

Some experts believe that eliminating Sinwar and Deif would significantly weaken Hamas but would not destroy it, which remains Israel’s stated goal. “Sinwar and Deif are clearly inner-ring leaders whose loss would harm Hamas, but the group appears to have contingency plans in place if its cadres are killed,” said Hamas expert H.A. Hellyer for International Security in the Royal United Service. Institute in London in The Times of Israel.