Shortly after the October 7 attacks in 2023, says Dov Lieber in The Wall Street Journal, Israeli intelligence set up a task force called NILI, a Hebrew acronym for the words “The Eternal One of Israel Doesn’t Lie”. The name, first used by Jewish spies in World War One, had a simple meaning: “no one identified in the attack would be forgotten”. Since then, the group has slowly but methodically built up a list of thousands of militants involved in the assault. They have pored over video footage recorded on the militants’ phones and GoPro cameras, interrogated Gazan detainees and combed through intercepted phone calls. And just as they did to the Palestinians who killed 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, they are hunting the perpetrators down.

“No participant is deemed too insignificant.” A man who was recorded driving a tractor through a border fence on October 7 was identified, located and blown up in an airstrike in Gaza two years later. A Hamas platoon commander was killed after a video showed his head poking out of a window during the assault on the Nova music festival. Those higher up the chain are targeted with similar vigour: Saleh al-Arouri, Hamas’s top operative in Lebanon, was killed in an airstrike on his old office in Beirut. Ismail Haniyeh, the terrorist group’s leader, was taken out with a bomb hidden in his room at a guesthouse in Tehran. The legality of these revenge strikes is debatable, to say the least. Hundreds of other Gazans charged with involvement in October 7 are in Israeli custody awaiting trial. But the Israelis are determined to track down every last attacker. “It will take time, just as it did after Munich,” said Mossad director David Barnea in 2024. “But our hands will reach them, wherever they are.”

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This week we’ve run pieces on all the Big and Important and Serious news: the already interminable Labour leadership race; US-China relations; the merits or otherwise of rejoining the EU; the AI backlash; Vladimir Putin’s bizarre fantasy world. And, as ever, we’ve leavened it with a highly enjoyable mix of lighter stuff:

🧠 The hardest times table
🏃 “Scientology speedrunners”
🧱 One of the biggest ever Lego sets
🤭 A naughty anecdote from the House of Lords
💥 The changing sounds of movies
😗 Brazil’s “whistling-only” WhatsApp groups
💘 £70,000 matchmakers
🪑 Xi Jinping’s “cushion diplomacy”
🤣 Robert Jenrick getting rinsed in parliament
⛹️‍♀️ Sporting moments as art
💨 “Heavy breasts in the west of Scotland”

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