Israel Says It Killed Two October 7 Attackers in Separate Gaza Strikes

The Israeli military said on 20 July 2026 that a drone strike in Nuseirat, in central Gaza, killed an Islamic Jihad operative it identified as Taher Elohad, whom it accused of participating in the 7 October 2023 Nova music festival attack and of commanding the abduction of Inbar Haiman. A second strike, on mourners at Elohad's funeral, killed four people, according to Gazan accounts relayed by the Abu Ali Express channel. The two incidents, announced within minutes of each other by the IDF Arabic-language Spokesperson and by Israeli reporter Amit Segal, show the war's targeted-killing campaign pressing on even as the political track remains frozen, and they expose in real time the lethal arithmetic that targeted killings impose on the civilians who gather around them.

The pattern is now familiar: an airstrike against a named militant; a follow-up strike against those who come to bury him; competing casualty counts filtered through partisan channels. The Israeli framing treats the second strike as a separate operation against a fresh target set. The framing from inside Gaza treats the second strike as inseparable from the first, because the mourners were drawn there by the first. Both framings rest on identifiable evidence. The dispute is over whose risk calculus governs.

What the IDF says happened

The IDF Arabic-language Spokesperson channel posted at 14:02 UTC on 20 July that the military had "eliminated an Islamic Jihad terrorist who infiltrated the Nova music festival during the October 7th massacre and commanded the abduction of Inbar Haiman." A second, separate item on the same channel announced a further strike against another "GAP terrorist" linked to the Nova attack. The channel's English-language handle reposted the material with the same identification.

Israeli national reporter Amit Segal amplified the announcement at 14:09 UTC, citing the IDF Spokesman directly: the operative had "raided the Nova party in the October 7th massacre and commanded the kidnapping of the late Inbar Hyman," Segal wrote, adding that "in another attack" a second GAP-affiliated operative had also been killed. Segal's account repeated the IDF line without independent confirmation of the targets' identities or their specific roles at Nova; the sourcing chain is the IDF to Segal to the public.

What Gazan accounts report

The Abu Ali Express channel, a Telegram feed that aggregates reporting from within Gaza, posted at 14:20 UTC that four people had been killed "a short time ago" in an Israeli drone strike on participants at the funeral of Taher Elohad, described as "a terrorist of the Islamic Jihad" who had himself been killed hours earlier in Nuseirat. The post did not identify the four dead by name or specify whether they were civilians, militants, or armed escorts common at militant funerals in Gaza.

Abu Ali Express did not provide video or photographic evidence in the post reviewed by this publication. The channel's editorial line is sympathetic to Palestinian armed factions and treats Israeli accounts with skepticism by default. That posture is worth flagging when reading its casualty counts: the figure of four dead is a floor, not a confirmed total, and the channel's silence on the identity of the funeral-goers leaves open whether any were combatants.

Why the second strike matters more than the first

The targeted killing of a named 7 October participant is, by now, a recurring headline. Roughly 1,200 people were killed in the Nova attack and the rest of the 7 October assaults, and Israel has spent the intervening years running the surviving participants to ground. Operatives identified by name, placed geographically, and struck from the air: this is the operational baseline, and Elohad fits it.

The funeral strike is the harder case. International humanitarian law does not categorically protect mourners, but it does prohibit attacks that fail to discriminate between combatants and civilians, and it requires that the expected civilian harm not be excessive relative to the military advantage sought. The IDF's framing, in which mourners at an Islamic Jihad funeral are presumptively linked to the group's military wing, is the legal predicate the military would offer. The Gazan framing, in which four people came to a burial and were killed for it, sits closer to the civilian-protection end of the spectrum. The two framings are not reconcilable on the present evidence, and they likely will not be reconciled on any future evidence: the relevant facts are inside a sealed Israeli targeting process and an uncontrolled Gazan aftermath.

What remains contested

Three pieces of the record are not yet established on open sources. First, whether Elohad was, in fact, a participant in the Nova assault; the IDF named him, but the underlying intelligence is not public, and Israeli identifications of Nova attackers have on occasion been corrected after the fact. Second, whether any of the four killed at the funeral were themselves members of an armed faction; the IDF's second announcement, of a "GAP terrorist" killed in a separate strike, suggests at least one further militant was targeted, but the channel's wording leaves room for ambiguity about which strike killed whom. Third, whether the funeral-goers were warned; Israel has used roof-knock and other advance-warning procedures inconsistently across the war, and no warning is mentioned in either the IDF or Abu Ali Express posts reviewed here.

The structural picture is the one that survives the evidentiary fog. Israel's targeted-killing campaign against 7 October participants is widening its definition of the target set, and the campaign's tempo has not slowed even as the broader war's intensity has ebbed in some areas. The funeral strike is the visible mechanism by which a single targeting decision multiplies into several: the named target, the would-be rescuers, the family, the mourners, the bystanders. The Israeli state argues that the campaign is lawful and necessary. The Palestinian and international-humanitarian critique argues that the campaign's expanding blast radius has eroded the distinction the law exists to preserve. The dispute will outlast the news cycle in which it surfaced.

Desk note: Monexus led with the IDF's announcement and the Gazan counter-account in the same paragraph, because the dispute between them is the story. We named Abu Ali Express as the source for the funeral-strike casualty figure and flagged its editorial line, rather than treating its number as confirmed.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://t.me/idfofficial
• https://t.me/amitsegal
• https://t.me/abualiexpress
• https://t.me/idfofficial/English
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Re'im_music_festival_attack
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Hamas-led_attack_on_Israel
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Targeted_killing