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Israel says 4,000 of the 6,000 October 7 terrorists are dead, and 2,000 remain on the list

Israel Says It Has Killed 4,000 of the 6,000 October 7 Terrorists. Here’s How the Count Grew.

by
M.A. Rothman

By M.A. RothmanOctober 8, 2026 · 5 min read
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Israel says it has now killed about 4,000 of the roughly 6,000 terrorists who crossed into the country on October 7, 2023. Defense Minister Israel Katz announced the figure on Monday, October 5, two days before the massacre’s third anniversary, and vowed that the remaining 2,000 will be hunted down as well.

If that number sounds different from what you read two months ago, it is. In August, the published tally was “more than 2,700” killed out of about 5,000. Both sets of numbers come from Israeli security officials, and the gap between them is not a contradiction so much as a revised count. Here is how they fit together.

What Katz announced

According to The Times of Israel, the new figures were presented to the cabinet on Sunday night, October 4, by the head of the IDF’s Military Intelligence Directorate, Maj. Gen. Shlomi Binder. Katz made them public the next day. “Six thousand terrorists crossed the border into Israel on October 7 and carried out the atrocities,” he said in a statement. “Of them, 4,000 have been killed so far, leaving another 2,000.”

Binder’s own message was just as direct. As reported by The Jewish Chronicle, he said: “Two thousand remain – we will get every last one of them.”

Katz said he and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have instructed the military and security services to kill everyone who took part in the onslaught, “without limitation and under any circumstances, from the senior ranks to the junior ranks.” On X, he put it this way: “Prime Minister Netanyahu and I ordered the IDF to pursue and eliminate them all,” adding, “This is the command of the murdered and the fallen, and this is our duty as a people and a state – and we will fulfil it.”

The Times of Israel broke down the 4,000: earlier assessments found between 1,200 and 1,600 terrorists were killed inside Israel during the attack itself. Thousands more fled back into Gaza, and around 2,400 of those were killed afterward, in the fighting that followed or in targeted strikes. Another 300 alleged perpetrators are in Israeli custody, awaiting judgment by special military tribunals that have yet to be set up.

Why the numbers changed

The earlier figures came from a Times of Israel report published August 9, 2026, in which the IDF and the Shin Bet publicly acknowledged for the first time a dedicated mission to hunt down the October 7 perpetrators. That report estimated that about 5,000 people took part in the attack or helped hold hostages, and said more than 2,700 had been confirmed killed by the military. Israel’s Channel 12, cited in the same report, put the number on the hunters’ list at 2,800, a figure that included the roughly 1,200 terrorists killed by Israeli forces during the attack.

Two things moved between August and October. First, the denominator: the IDF had previously estimated about 5,600 infiltrators, and the latest intelligence assessment raises it to about 6,000. Second, the count of the dead rose, both because of continued strikes (the IDF said 17 October 7 participants or hostage-holders were killed in September alone) and, apparently, because of the updated assessment Binder brought to the cabinet. The officials have not published a line-by-line reconciliation, and these remain Israeli government figures. But the direction is the same in every version: most of the men who came across that fence are no longer alive, and the rest are on a list.

The unit that keeps the list

That list belongs to Nili, a joint IDF-Shin Bet unit set up immediately after the massacre and staffed by veteran intelligence personnel from both agencies. Its name is a Hebrew acronym for a verse meaning “The Eternal One of Israel does not lie,” borrowed from a Jewish underground spy network that operated during World War I.

According to The Times of Israel, Nili built its list of thousands of names largely from the terrorists’ own evidence: facial recognition run against footage from the GoPro-style cameras many attackers wore, combined with field intelligence, interrogations of detainees and testimony from freed hostages. The targets are not limited to gunmen. They include those who held hostages, those who abused them, and those who took part in the staged hostage-release ceremonies. Israeli security officials told The Wall Street Journal, as reported by The Daily Wire, that a person can be targeted once investigators tie them to October 7 crimes with at least two pieces of evidence.

The reach of that effort is illustrated by one case the IDF has publicized. According to the military, Bakr Mujida drove a tractor through the border fence on October 7. Nearly two years later, Israeli forces found him walking down a street in Gaza and killed him in an airstrike.

From the top down

The campaign reached the top of Hamas long ago. Military chief Mohammed Deif was killed in an Israeli strike in Khan Younis in July 2024. Political chief Ismail Haniyeh was killed in Tehran on July 31, 2024. Yahya Sinwar, the architect of the massacre, was killed by Israeli troops in Rafah on October 16, 2024. And Izz al-Din al-Haddad, who had commanded Hamas’s military wing in Gaza since 2025, was killed in May 2026.

Israeli officials have pointed to the aftermath of the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre as a precedent. The difference is scale. The Munich hunt targeted dozens of people. October 7 involved thousands, who killed about 1,200 people and dragged 251 hostages into Gaza. The last living hostages came home on October 13, 2025, and the remains of the final hostage, police officer Ran Gvili, were returned in January 2026. The ceasefire did not end the hunt. If anything, with no hostages left in Hamas hands, it freed Israel to press it harder.

Critics will call this a vendetta. It is not. It is a state doing what states are supposed to do when thousands of armed men invade, slaughter families in their homes and carry children across a border: find every one of them and make sure it never pays.

Three years later, 2,000 names are still on the list, and Israel has made it plain it intends to cross off every one.

Sources

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