The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) announced Tuesday that it had killed a Hamas terrorist who murdered an Israeli father in front of his children in one of the most notorious and sadistic scenes of the October 7 terrorist attack.
The terrorist, Ahmed Fozi Nazer Muhammad Wadia, participated in an attack on the border town of Netiv Ha’asara. His actions appeared on the 43-minute film of Hamas atrocities; Breitbart News was at the first screening in October.
As Breitbart News reported:
A father and two sons, in their underwear, having just woken up, are trying to flee from their home.
The father picks up one boy and all three run to a shelter in the back yard.
A terrorist peers over the fence and lobs a grenade into the shelter. It bounces off the back wall and explodes.
The father’s body falls forward. A boy appears, covered in his father’s blood, looking at his father.
For a moment, you think the terrorists will shoot him.
Instead, the armed terrorists bring the boys inside, into the home.
One boy sits on a chair, the other on a couch, both still in their underwear, both covered in trickles of blood, theirs and their father’s. They wail: “Daddy! Daddy!” The boy on the couch says, “Itay, I think they are going to kill us.”
A terrorist — with a Palestinian flag patch on his flak jacket — opens the fridge and asks if they want water — “mayim,” in Hebrew. The one on the couch replies, in English, that he wants his mother — not “mayim,” but “mommy.” He repeats: “Mommy. Mommy.”
Then comes the worst moment of all.
We see the boy on the couch, now doubled over on the rug. “Why am I alive?” he wails.
He then looks at the brother in the chair. There is a red, black space where his eye used to be. He asks if his brother can see out of that eye. He says that he cannot. The other brother asks again. Are you joking? He repeats that he cannot see.
Somehow, the boys escape together, out the back door.
The boys and their mother survived; the father, Gil Taasa, did not. As the Times of Israel notes, Taasa had tried to defend the town:
Gil, a senior firefighter in the Ashkelon fire station, grabbed his gun and shot at the terrorists until he ran out of bullets, his son Koren later recounted in an interview with the Kan public broadcaster.
Then, the terrorists threw a grenade into the shelter they were hiding in: “There’s no way he wasn’t afraid but he decided to save us and he jumped on the grenade… there was an explosion, I saw smoke, and suddenly we were covered in blood.”
Koren said the terrorists came to check that Gil was actually dead, then drank the cola that was in the fridge and left the house. The two wounded brothers ran next door to their mother, where they hid in their safe room for hours until they were evacuated.
An older brother, Or, 17, was murdered by Hamas at Zikim Beach, where had gone fishing that morning.
Breitbart News later identified the precise location of that atrocity in Netiv Ha’asara, as part of the first visit by journalists to Netiv Ha’asara in November.
The IDF revealed that it had killed Wadia in an airstrike on a terrorist base that had been placed — cynically, and typically — near the Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City.
In a statement, the IDF and Israel Security Agency (ISA, or Shabak, or Shin Bet) announced:
In a joint IDF and ISA operation, the IAF struck a compound where Hamas terrorists were operating in Gaza City. Eight Hamas terrorists from the Daraj Tuffah Battalion were eliminated during the strike, including Ahmed Fozi Nazer Muhammad Wadia, the commander of the Nukhba Company in the Daraj Tuffah Battalion and a member of Hamas’ paragliding unit. On October 7th, Wadia invaded the community of Netiv HaAsara using a paraglider and took command of the massacre of civilians carried out by Hamas terrorists in the community.
Wadia is the terrorist who drank cola inside the Taasa family home in view of Gil Taasa’s children, who had survived the massacre after terrorists murdered their father on October 7th.
An additional terrorist eliminated in the strike was responsible for several combat specialties in the Daraj Tuffah Battalion, including engineering, sniping, and anti-tank operations, and was responsible for supplying the explosives used to blow up the security fence in the Daraj Tuffah Battalion’s area during the October 7th Massacre.
The precise strike on the compound where the terrorists were operating was located near the Al-Ahli Hospital compound in Gaza City. No strike was conducted inside the Al-Ahli Hospital premises.
Prior to the strike, numerous steps were taken to mitigate the risk of harming civilians, including the use of precise munitions, aerial surveillance, and additional intelligence.
Al-Ahli Hospital was also the site where Hamas unleashed one of its most notorious false claims early in the war — namely, that Israel had killed 500 people in an airstrike on the hospital.
In fact, the hospital parking lot had been hit by an errant Islamic Jihad rocket, and 50 people, at most, had died, with the hospital structure intact.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of “”The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days,” available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of “The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency,” now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.