While driving in the central Israeli city of Rosh Ha’ayin in late June, eight months after being freed from captivity in the Gaza Strip, former hostage Rom Braslavski received a phone call from a military officer.

“We wanted to update you that Abu Yousef, Talel Abd al-Aal, was eliminated,” the officer said to Braslavski, referring to a Palestinian Islamic Jihad commander who held and abused him during his two years in captivity by the terror group.

“You can’t be serious,” Braslavski replied.

“I’m very serious. You have no idea how happy I am, how excited I am, for you,” the officer said.

“Wow, I can’t believe it. Wait a second, I have to pull over for something like this,” Braslavski said, bursting into tears. “Are you serious? You are 100% sure?”

As with other announcements of strikes in Gaza, the Israel Defense Forces declared in an official statement released soon after that it had killed al-Aal, an Islamic Jihad commander who held hostages and commanded terrorists as they invaded Israel on October 7, 2023, because he had “posed an immediate threat” to troops in the Strip.

The claim that it had struck al-Aal in self-defense rather than revenge meant that the killing was legitimate under the terms of the ongoing US-brokered ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, which limits Israeli operations to responding to violations of the truce, including by thwarting plans by terror operatives to attack troops.

However, an analysis by The Times of Israel has found that, despite the ceasefire,  the IDF has in the past few months stepped up a large-scale retribution campaign with the avowed aim of hunting down and eliminating every single terrorist who took part in the October 7 massacre.

On that day, thousands of Gazans poured into Israel, invading communities, music festivals, army posts and other locations and massacring some 1,200 people and abducting 251 hostages in the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust.

Israel has created a list of all the Gazans who were identified as having invaded Israeli territory on October 7 using a plethora of video and photographic evidence of the attack posted online by terrorists on and after the attack and running the footage through facial recognition software. Also on the list are all Hamas leaders involved in orchestrating the massacre, according to Israeli officials.

So far, of the estimated 5,000 terrorists who participated in the October 7 attack or helped hold hostages, more than 2,700 have been confirmed by the military to have been killed — including those killed during........

© The Times of Israel