2,800 eliminated and the message: we will not forget those who crossed the fence | Dr. Moshe Elad

They crossed the fence one morning. Some of them were Nukhba members, others were Hamas, Islamic Jihad, or Gaza residents who joined after the fence was breached. Within hours, many of them murdered, kidnapped, looted, set fires, and even documented their actions. They surely assumed that afterwards they would return to Gaza, blend into the crowd, change clothes, hide their weapons, and the story would be over.

In the world, there is a "difficulty" in understanding Israel's eagerness to settle accounts with terrorists. If you did not eliminate the terrorist during a terror event - the story ended. But from Israel's perspective, the story has only just begun.

The figure recently revealed, according to which about 2,800 participants of the October 7 massacre have been eliminated, indicates a profound change, more than just a successful liquidation operation. Behind this number lies a new concept: whoever participated in the massacre may have managed to return home, but did not return to being anonymous. The message Israel seeks to convey is not only to Hamas and its commanders. It is directed at the individual participant, at whoever thinks that if he is not a senior leader or a known commander, no one will look for him. But if you participated - you were identified. And if you were identified - you are not forgotten.

Perhaps there is also an important historical lesson here. Israel and the Palestinians have already experienced a situation in the past where a terror method that seemed tactically effective became, gradually, a strategic burden. In the Al-Aqsa Intifada, in the early 2000s, suicide bombings were one of the weapons most identified with Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and even organizations linked to Fatah. The attacks took a heavy toll, terrorized the Israeli public, and disrupted the routine of life in the country. In Israel, it is customary to attribute their decline, and rightly so, to the separation fence, improved intelligence, and counter-terrorism operations.

But perhaps the picture was more complex. After reading Palestinian materials over the years, the impression strengthened in me that the Palestinian leaderships themselves also conducted a kind of "tartib al-bayt" - house cleaning. They understood that the attacks, while harming Israel, simultaneously caused heavy damage to the Palestinian image in the world.

The world could understand resistance to occupation. It was much harder to explain why one should murder passengers on buses, diners in restaurants, or civilians on the street. As the attacks multiplied, the alienation widened. Images of families glorifying the death of their sons and promises to send more children on the same path may have aroused admiration in parts of the Arab world, but in the West, they often created moral shock.

The terror organizations did not stop fighting Israel. They simply changed their toolbox. The NILI unit is not just a body intended to find and kill the participants of October 7. Its strategic significance may be broader: the creation of long-term personal deterrence. The message is not just that Israel will respond. The message is that time will not save the participant in a terror event.

In the past, a terror operative could assume that if he survived the action and returned home, the danger had passed. Today, documentation, intelligence, technological identification, and continuous tracking create a different reality. Whoever was an anonymous face in a crowd might become a name, a picture, and an intelligence file. It is possible to escape the scene. It is harder to escape the memory.

Has Palestinian society already learned the lesson? Not yet at the public level. There is no broad soul-searching heard, according to which October 7 was a strategic failure that brought destruction upon the Palestinians themselves. But there is no need for the lesson to appear first in polls or speeches. It may appear precisely with the individual. It will appear with the young man who receives a weapon and remembers that thousands of October 7 massacre participants were located and killed. It will appear with the person who understands that the leader who gave the order might disappear into a hiding place, but he - the one sent to execute - might bear the price even after a long time.

There is no guarantee that terror will disappear. Ideology, hatred, and revenge do not disappear because of an intelligence database. But the history of the second Intifada teaches that terror organizations sometimes know how to change means when they reach the conclusion that the cost exceeds the benefit.

This may be the deepest meaning of NILI: not just revenge for the past, but an attempt to shape the future. Not just to find whoever participated in the October 7 massacre, but to make the future participant think again before crossing the fence.