After Three Weeks of Silence, the IDF and Shin Bet Describe the Nili Mission on the Record
Times of Israel reports that both services have acknowledged for the first time a standing mission to kill every participant in the 7 October 2023 attack. The operation is not new; the decision to discuss it is.
In a piece published at 12:26 am on Sunday 9 August, Jeremy Sharon of The Times of Israel reported that the IDF and the Shin Bet have acknowledged for the first time the existence of a standing mission — run by a unit called Nili — to locate and kill every participant in the 7 October 2023 attack. Officers in the unit confirmed on the record the use of facial recognition, artificial intelligence, detainee interrogations and human intelligence to build targets. Three weeks earlier, for the same paper’s earlier story on the same unit, “the Shin Bet and IDF did not respond to requests to discuss the ongoing operation.” The change of posture arrives with an election due by 27 October, a ceasefire formally in force in Gaza, and an unresolved argument with Washington over the circumstances in which Israel may strike there at all.
The arithmetic offered with the disclosure is approximate and not internally auditable. The Times of Israel puts roughly 5,000 people in the original attacking force, 1,200 of them killed on 7 October itself and 1,500 killed since. Roughly a month earlier, JNS reported 2,561 Oct 7 infiltrators killed — a figure close to the sum of 2,700 but not the same claim, published on a different basis. The Wall Street Journal reported on the task force in May 2026, describing a list of thousands of names and “one of the most personal and highly technical targeting campaigns in the history of warfare,” but attributed it to the Shin Bet and Mossad rather than the Shin Bet and the IDF. Nili was formed immediately after the attack and named for the First World War Jewish intelligence network; an IDF official said after the October 2025 ceasefire that its work would continue “even as time passes, until the last of [the terrorists is killed],” and “in accordance with the legal and operational framework.”
Assessment: Treat this as an institutional decision, not a leak. A service that declined to discuss an operation in July and puts officers on the record in August has chosen a moment: a campaign in which the 7 October failure is the central charge against the government, and a diplomatic file in which Israel is arguing that decommissioning must precede withdrawal. Distrust the precision. Attacker death counts are compiled by the same body that selects the targets, and the 1,200 attributed here to attackers killed on the day sits one digit from the 1,200 Israelis killed. The Mossad-versus-IDF split between the WSJ and ToI accounts suggests two briefing chains, not one settled file.