Israel Formed Secret Unit to Kill or Capture Oct. 7 Attackers

Israel established a secret elite intelligence task force in the aftermath of Hamas’s October 7, 2023, massacre to track down and kill or capture every terrorist involved in the attack — from senior commanders who orchestrated the assault to individual gunmen who crossed into southern Israel during the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. The unit — known as NILI, a Hebrew acronym derived from a biblical verse meaning “The Eternal One of Israel Does Not Lie” — was formed by Israel’s Shin Bet internal security service and military intelligence shortly after the Hamas-led attack that killed roughly 1,200 people and saw 251 Israelis taken hostage, most of them civilians.

The task force compiled a database containing thousands of names, including Hamas Nukhba commandos — the terror group’s elite assault force that spearheaded much of the October 7 infiltration — as well as additional Palestinians identified as participating in the massacre.  Israeli intelligence personnel relied on a sweeping range of surveillance and intelligence tools to identify suspects, including facial recognition software run against videos uploaded by Hamas terrorists themselves, intercepted communications, cellphone location data, social media footage, and interrogations of Gazan detainees captured during the war.

Inside Israel, the operation has drawn repeated comparisons to the country’s years-long campaign following the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre, when Israeli intelligence hunted down Palestinian terrorists involved in the murder of 11 Israeli athletes. “It will take time, just as it did after Munich,” Mossad Director David Barnea said in 2024. “But our hands will reach them, wherever they are.”