Katz says 2,000 of the 7 October attackers are still alive, and orders the hunt finished

Israel's defence minister, Israel Katz, said on Monday that about 2,000 participants in the Hamas-led attacks of 7 October 2023 were still alive, and that the military had been ordered to find and kill them. He put the number who crossed into Israel that day at about 6,000, and the number already killed at 4,000. He said he and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had given the order. The wording he used was that the pursuit ran from the most senior to the most junior.

The figures are Katz's. They are not an IDF table released with the remarks. Six thousand who crossed, four thousand dead, two thousand outstanding: the arithmetic is the policy. A hunt for 2,000 named or unnamed men, three years after the attack, is a different order from a strike on a commander. It implies a list, a method for adding names, and a standard for deciding that a particular person was among those who crossed. Katz did not publish the list. He published the totals and the instruction.

The same day, at the state memorial on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem, Netanyahu said Israel would continue to pursue those who carried out the attack and held hostages, and that Hamas rule in Gaza would end. The memorial sentence and the minister's numbers sit together. One is the political commitment, repeated at the official ceremony two days before the calendar anniversary. The other is a residual count.

The attack killed about 1,200 people in Israel and took 251 hostages. Gaza's health authorities put the death toll from Israeli operations since then above 74,000 in one account carried with Katz's remarks, and near 73,000 in another published the same week. Those figures include three years of war, not a count of the men who crossed the fence on the first morning. Katz's 4,000 is a claim about attackers killed. The health-ministry totals are a claim about Palestinians killed. They answer different questions, and neither is a substitute for the other.

Israel has killed much of Hamas's senior leadership in that period, including Yahya Sinwar and his brother Mohammed Sinwar. A residual of 2,000, if Katz's total of 6,000 is the starting set, is mostly not the known command. The phrase from the most senior to the most junior is doing work here. It says rank will not be a reason to stop, and it says the outstanding names are not only the men whose photographs have been on posters. Junior participants, three years on, may be in Gaza, in Israeli custody, or dead under a different count. The order treats the outstanding 2,000 as a pursuit, not as a closed file.

The timing is the anniversary week. Monday was the state memorial. Wednesday is the calendar date, with public events at about 400 sites and an evening ceremony at Yarkon Park. Katz's order is the military line running under both. A ceasefire associated with the US plan endorsed in UN Security Council resolution 2803 has not, on his account, retired the list. US ambassador Mike Waltz said on 6 October that every hostage was now out, the living and the dead. The hostage file and the attacker file are being closed on different clocks.

A kill order stated by a defence minister is a political fact as well as a military one. It tells the IDF what the cabinet wants done with the residual names. It also tells Hamas, and anyone who still claims a role in the 7 October crossing, that the government is not treating the anniversary as an end. Whether 2,000 is a firm list or a rounded remainder is not something the remarks settle. What they settle is the instruction: pursue the rest, senior and junior.

Xinhua carried the remarks, and they were repeated by outlets that used the agency's count. Until the IDF publishes its own residual figure, Katz's 6,000, 4,000 and 2,000 are the numbers on the record. They are the numbers the anniversary week is being asked to absorb, alongside the memorials, the hostage returns, and a war whose civilian death toll Gaza's health authorities still measure in the tens of thousands.