Everyone who watched the video in October 2023 remembers the motorcycle. A young woman on the back, reaching toward her boyfriend as he was dragged away separately, screaming a sentence that would travel around the world: “Don’t kill me.” The woman was Noa Argamani, then 25, taken from the Nova music festival on the morning of October 7, 2023. The man driving the motorcycle had a name the world did not yet know: Saher Nidal Ratfi Sakr.
On September 26, in central Gaza’s Nuseirat, that name was crossed off. Israel’s military and the Shin Bet announced that a precision strike there had killed Sakr, identified as the Hamas member who abducted Argamani, Israeli media including the Jerusalem Post reported on the 27th. Police released aerial footage: a drone-like object tracks a man walking along a road, strikes, smoke rises, and a crowd gathers to lay a cloth over the body. Israel’s military said Sakr was tied to an international jihadist organization operating in Gaza, had supplied weapons to Hamas throughout the war, and had been involved in planning new attacks against Israeli soldiers and civilians.
The military also said a separate October 22 strike in northern Gaza killed Muhammad Hamad Muhammad Gabain, described as a commander in Hamas’s military wing.
A spreadsheet with thousands of names
Gaza has been in a technical ceasefire since last October, but for men like Sakr the war never paused. In August, Israel’s military and the Shin Bet confirmed for the first time that a dedicated unit — called Nili, a name drawn from the Hebrew Bible’s First Book of Samuel, 15:29, “the Eternal One of Israel does not lie” — exists to hunt those who took part in the kidnappings and captivity of October 7.
In a Channel 12 interview that month, the first time its officers described their work, they told of assembling “endless piles of material” — the attackers’ own videos and photographs, facial recognition software, artificial intelligence, interrogations, informants, detained militants — and building a spreadsheet of thousands of names. They developed specialized facial-recognition tools and used AI, they said, to “complete the whole picture.” Men who abused hostages in captivity and those who appeared at hostage-release parades are all on the list.
The arithmetic the unit publishes is cold by design. Of roughly 5,000 people Israel says took part in the October 7 infiltration, killings and abductions, 2,800 have been killed — and more than 1,500 of those were eliminated later in Gaza through Nili’s tracking operations. About 300 more suspects are under arrest in Israel. The hunt is not an episode of the war; it is an institution of it.
Two hundred and forty-five days
Argamani herself came home after 245 days, freed on June 8 of the following year with three other hostages in the special forces operation known as Arnon. The raid fought its way out through heavy gunfire; Gaza’s Hamas-run health authorities said 274 Palestinians were killed that day, a figure that did not distinguish militants from civilians. Since her rescue she has carried her captivity from hall to hall — meeting G7 ambassadors in Tokyo, testifying at the UN Security Council in February 2025, and speaking at universities in five American cities.
What she says in those rooms does not soften with repetition. “Every night when I fell asleep, I thought it might be the last night of my life,” she has testified. It was “a life of complete fear, like a nightmare,” and “even at this moment, the hostages are living in hell.” Of the moment when young hostages held with her were released first, she says the feeling “can never be expressed in words,” and she has argued that a comprehensive hostage deal must be carried out in full. Even now, she says, looking at the photographs from that time is too hard.
The arithmetic of vengeance
The ledger of three years is now vast on every side. On October 7, 2023, Hamas and other Islamist militant groups breached Israel’s border, killed about 1,200 people and took more than 250 hostage. In the war that followed, more than 74,000 people have died in Gaza, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health authorities. And in the ledger’s narrower columns, a unit named for a verse about a God who does not lie keeps its spreadsheet, crossing off names one strike at a time — in Nuseirat, on a road, in the twenty-sixth year of the century’s first quarter, while somewhere in Tel Aviv a woman who once screamed from the back of a motorcycle still cannot look at the photographs.