IDF says it killed Hamas commander who murdered father in front of his kids on Oct. 7
Terrorist who led onslaught on moshav Netiv Ha’asara was filmed drinking Coca-Cola from fridge of family home, moments after killing Gil Taasa in front of his two youngest sons
The military on Tuesday confirmed reports that a Hamas Nukhba force company commander who led the invasion of Netiv Ha’asara on October 7 was killed in a recent airstrike in the Gaza Strip.
Ahmed Fawzi Nasser Muhammad Wadiyya was among eight Hamas terrorists killed in the strike on a compound used by the terror group near Gaza City’s al-Ahli hospital, according to a joint statement from the Israel Defense Forces and the Shin Bet.
The military said that Wadiyya was the commander of a Nukhba force company in the terror group’s Daraj-Tuffah Battalion. On October 7, he entered Netiv Ha’asara — a moshav near the Gaza border — by paraglider and oversaw the massacre of 22 of the community’s 900 residents.
He was the terrorist who was filmed drinking Coca-Cola from the fridge of the Taasa family home, moments after murdering Gil Taasa, 46, in front of his two youngest sons, Koren, 12, and Shay, 8, inside the same home.
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.
Gil’s oldest son Or, 17, had left early that morning to go fishing with some friends on Zikim beach, where he was murdered in the onslaught.
The family was updated on Monday that the IDF and the Shin Bet had taken out Wadiyya amid the ongoing war in Gaza, sparked by Hamas’s October 7 massacre, which left 1,200 dead and 251 taken hostage.
The IDF said that the other seven terrorists killed in the Gaza City strike were also members of the Daraj-Tuffah Battalion, including one who was involved in supplying the bombs used by the terror group to breach the Gaza security barrier on October 7.
The strike took place outside the hospital, and the military noted that it took various steps to mitigate harm to civilians.
