Israel Kills Hamas Commander as Hunt for Gaza Terrorists Intensifies

As a Washington-led peace plan and a ceasefire in Gaza stumbles along, Israel is intensifying a military campaign to eliminate future Hamas threats, including by killing current terrorist leaders and October 7 perpetrators. Israelis are highly skeptical of a recent Hamas tentative and conditional agreement to disarm. “We all understand that this is not going to happen,” Defense Minister Israel Katz said Tuesday. “The Israel Defense Forces is prepared, once given the directive, to eliminate Hamas, to finish the job.”Mr. Katz spoke after announcing the elimination of the Hamas commander of the Rafah brigade, Nael Abu Obeid, in a drone strike. Three other top Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists were killed Wednesday as they attempted to attack Israeli soldiers, according to the IDF spokesman.Israeli intelligence sources warn that Hamas might retaliate by attempting to kidnap Israeli soldiers or another form of retaliation to the intensified IDF killing campaign Critics, meanwhile, say that Israel’s campaign is illegal and that it diminishes any hope of peace and plans to rebuild Gaza. “We go on having strikes in Gaza and we go on having serious threats to the civilian population in Gaza,” the United Nations Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, told reporters Wednesday. Israeli officials counter that their goal is to secure southern Israeli communities from future attacks from Gaza and other threats.At the same time the IDF and the internal security agency, Shabak, have launched a joint campaign to identify and kill those who actively participated in the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, massacres. Named Nili, a Hebrew acronym of the biblical phrase “Israel’s Eternal One Will Not Lie,” the unit is fashioned after a similarly-named post-WWI Jewish intelligence unit.Nili’s goal is to reach “anyone” who was part of October 7, one of its commanders, who was only identified as First Lieutenant L, told Israel N12 network recently. “It could be the guy who drove the tractor over a border fence or the Nukhba commander who led the invasion,” she said. Nukhba is the elite unit of Hamas’s military wing, al-Kassam Brigades. Most October 7 leaders have been killed during the war, including the top commander Yehya Sinwar and his brother Muhammad, and the elusive field commander Muhammad Deif. Another top commander, Izz al-Din al-Hadad, was killed this May. The likes of Abu Obeid, who was struck on Tuesday, are a second or third generation of post-October 7 commanders. As the IDF hunts these new commanders, the Nili unit is meticulously gathering files on thousands of individuals who participated in the 2023 attack.Nili uses Gaza informers and relies on interrogation of captured Hamas members. It also relies on facial recognition programs and captured Hamas data files. On October 7 many of the terrorists used go-pro cameras to film their own atrocities. On that day in 2023 a young Hamas man famously called his mother in Gaza to brag about shooting ten Jews at a southern kibbutz. That man was located and killed by Nili. After WWII Israel launched a campaign to hunt down Nazis who escaped Europe, including Adolf Eichmann who was kidnapped in Argentina and brought to trial at Jerusalem. Similarly, Prime Minister Golda Meir instructed the Mossad to kill any terrorist who participated in the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre. The current campaign to hunt down October 7 perpetrators, though, is taking place as Israel is under intense scrutiny and its strategy in Gaza allegedly amounts to war crimes or worse. A new film, Naza, claims that the IDF’s tactics include deliberately targeting Hamas leaders at dinner time, disregarding that wives, children, and other innocents might be killed. Naza is “based on blood libels, deliberate distortions of reality, and grave, false accusations against IDF soldiers and commanders,” the army chief of staff, Lieutenant General Eyal Zamir, said Wednesday. IDF defenders note that it has special procedures, unparalleled in other militaries, to minimize harm to non-combatants. Nili is targeting October 7 perpetrators in compliance with international law, Lieutenant L told N12. IDF’s legal unit, she says, scrutinizes and approves each operation. “We can’t target someone in our files who participated in the massacre but is no longer involved in combat,” she says.

Israel Kills Hamas Commander as Hunt for Gaza Terrorists Intensifies

Israel Kills Hamas Commander as Hunt for Gaza Terrorists Intensifies

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