Inside the IDF: How we hunted, captured and killed Oct 7th terrorists

Phone taps, interrogations in the field, and exhaustive information gathering leads to the capture or assassination of the Hamas force that led the October 7 attack.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

A former senior official of the Shabak described to Israel National News Tuesday the methods that the Nili team in the intelligence agency is using to hunt down the Hamas terrorists who led the invasion of Israel on October 7.

Nili is an acronym of the Biblically-based aphorism Netzach Yisrael Lo Yishaker (The eternity of Israel will not lie), meaning in essence that the Jewish people will always survive.

It’s a huge and painstaking job, Amit Assa told the news site.

“The agents collect intelligence from all possible sources available to the Shabak,” he said, in order to create a detailed file for each terrorist.

This includes finding out their addresses and all who are related to and work with them, gleaning information from social media, and from listening in on their phones.

The phone taps are a very important part of the hunt, but it’s hard work, he said.

“People have to put on headphones and listen [carefully] and derive intelligence information from the calls. Many of the conversations are irrelevant,” he explained, “and you have to be very focused, figure out who’s talking…and can add details about his location, etc., so I can move forward with a specific operational plan to get our hands on him,” said Assa.

Another massive source of information is the Shabak’s intelligence force in the field, Unit 504.

“As we spend more time in the Gaza Strip, our intelligence on Hamas, its operatives and infrastructure grows,” he noted. “It comes mainly from the interrogations of Nukhba members, who tell us who is in his squad, who are the commanders, his responsibilities, where they train, where they run to hide, where the tunnels and infrastructure are.”

“The other way [of gaining information] is by recruiting terrorists to act as double agents,” a difficult but not impossible job, even in the midst of war, he said.

Assa pointed out that the number of targets is not as high as one might think but there is still a lot of work to be done.

“During the first days of fighting, on October 7 and 8, the IDF managed to locate and catch those in our territory,” he said. “Those who returned to the Strip and continue acting as Hamas Nukhba terrorists, or citizens who … entered the envelope [communities] and committed brutal murders and other acts, we need to pursue until we lay hands on them, which means arresting or eliminating them.”

He compared the task to what happened after the 1972 Munich Olympics, when Palestinian terrorists murdered 11 members of the Israeli team. Israel vowed to hunt down every perpetrator, and did so, although it took two decades until the last one was eliminated.

The Shabak can do it, Assa said, because the failure of October 7 was not the lack of intelligence information but that “we were all prisoners of the concept that Hamas can and wants to, but will not do it, because they were deterred in some way or another,” which was “a strategic, and not a tactical, failure.”

The Nili team was established just two weeks after Hamas’ surprise attack, with the mission to catch or kill every terrorist who took part in the massacres, sexual depravities and mutilations that left 1,200 people dead and several thousand injured, immediately setting off the ongoing war in the Gaza Strip.

The Nukhba force is ostensibly an elite naval commando unit of the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, but while a few boatloads of men invaded from the sea, hundreds led their compatriots in breaking through the border fence in trucks, cars and motorcycles or flying over it in paragliders in order to race to Israeli army bases, kibbutzim, towns, and the Nova dance rave to commit their slaughter.

Israel-Hamas warNukhbaShabak