The trial of the terrorists on October 7 in Israel risks facing a new delay—not due to the lack of law or budget, but because the state has not yet completed forming the prosecution team. The military prosecutor’s office warned the Ministry of Justice: if they do not receive 20 prosecutors who have been working with the massacre materials for almost three years, the preparation of indictments may be delayed by at least another two years.
Previously, state structures and the Knesset named January 2027 as a target for the first indictments.
As of August 12, 2026, it is important to separate fact from forecast here.
There is no official decision to postpone the processes for two years: it is a warning from the military prosecutor’s office about what will happen without the transfer of an experienced team. But even such a scenario drastically changes the picture because Israel has already passed a special law, allocated more than a billion shekels, and started creating separate infrastructure for the trial of hundreds of suspects in the crimes of October 7.
I am not a prosecutor and do not have access to closed materials of specific criminal cases, so I do not assess the sufficiency of evidence against individual suspects. As an author for NANews, regularly writing about security, war, and the work of state institutions, I compared the current warning with the Knesset’s decisions, the June report of the State Comptroller, and the already approved budget of the process. And here an important boundary appears: the first years of delay had a separate political-security reason related to hostages in Gaza, whereas the current problem relates to the organization of the prosecution system itself.
NANews — Israel News | Nikk.Agency June 3, 2026 detailed the allocation of more than 1 billion shekels for the trial of the terrorists of October 7. At that time, it was about the budget for 2026–2029, the judicial complex, security, logistics, computer systems, and personnel. Two months later, it became clear what could not be seen from a single budget decision: having money does not yet mean having a team capable of turning a huge array of evidence into hundreds of legally sustainable indictments.
Why the trial of the terrorists of October 7 did not start earlier
After the massacre on October 7, 2023, Israel faced a criminal process of a scale that the country’s modern judicial system had not known before. It is not about one defendant and not about one crime scene. Investigators need to link specific people to murders, kidnappings, sexual violence, attacks on settlements and military facilities, as well as other episodes of the attack. The State Comptroller in June 2026 indicated that indictments are expected to be formed against several hundred suspects.
At the same time, the absence of charges in the first years after October 7 cannot automatically be recorded in the same column as the current staffing delay. The State Comptroller’s report states that the Prime Minister and the Minister of Justice did not advance judicial processes while Israeli hostages remained in Gaza. The state feared that changing the legal status of captured terrorists, starting processes, or the prospect of maximum harsh sentences could complicate negotiations for the release of hostages and create additional risk for them.
As of February 2026, according to the same report, indictments for the crimes of the massacre itself had not yet been filed. However, this does not mean that no one was working on the cases all this time: the police, SHABAK, and prosecutors were collecting and systematizing materials, studying testimonies, videos, digital traces, and other evidence.
And here the number ’20 prosecutors’ stops looking like ordinary staffing statistics. This is a team that has been working with the materials practically from the first weeks after the massacre and already knows the internal structure of the huge data array. A new lawyer, even a very experienced one, does not receive such knowledge on the day of appointment.
Replacing this team with twenty new employees only by number is impossible. A new prosecutor will have to study not a folder with an ordinary criminal case, but a multi-year array of materials where one video, phone, interrogation, or testimony can be related to several defendants and several attack locations. If the state has to essentially re-immerse another team into the already collected evidence base, the loss of time becomes not an abstract threat, but a quite understandable procedural risk.
That is why the current situation differs from the first years after October 7. Then the pause was related to a specific state calculation around the fate of the hostages. Now the political decision on the trial has been made, a special law exists, funding is approved—and the bottleneck becomes the ability of several state structures to transfer people and powers to each other.
There is a law, a billion is allocated—why did the problem with prosecutors arise
On May 11, 2026, the Knesset approved a special legal mechanism for prosecuting participants in the October 7 attack with 93 votes and no votes against. The law provides for a special military court in Jerusalem, a separate procedure for forming judicial panels and charges, the publicity of key sessions, and the preservation of process materials. It also allows for the death penalty for the most serious crimes, and such a sentence must undergo mandatory appellate review.
The initiators of the law were Simcha Rothman, a deputy of ‘Religious Zionism,’ and Yulia Malinovskaya, a deputy of Yisrael Beiteinu. For them, it was initially not only about punishing specific terrorists. The process being created should simultaneously become a legal fixation of the crimes of October 7, so the sessions are expected to be documented, and a significant part of the materials preserved for the future.
Already on June 2, the government approved a budget framework of more than 1 billion shekels for 2026–2029. The money is intended not only for the sessions themselves but also for security, prisoner transportation, premises, technological infrastructure, the work of the prosecutor’s office, and personnel. Therefore, describing the current situation with the words ‘Israel has no money for the trial’ would be incorrect: the budget exists, the problem arose at the stage of turning it into a working organization.
The chronology at this point becomes especially important. First, the Knesset creates a special legal structure. Then the government allocates significant funding, the preparation of physical and technical infrastructure begins—and a few months later, the military prosecutor’s office warns that the previously designated schedule of charges cannot be maintained without the transfer of a team of 20 experienced prosecutors to it.
The IDF reported that six officers have already been approved and should enter the system. Simultaneously, the conditions for attracting other employees, including civilian prosecutors, are still being agreed upon, and the funding for the project, according to the army’s position, only arrived in recent weeks. So saying that the state is doing nothing at all would also be incorrect.
But this explanation raises another question. If the legislative and budgetary frameworks were ready in the spring and early summer, why did the money, staff positions, and accumulated prosecutorial expertise not end up in one working system earlier?
Publicly available data does not yet allow for honestly appointing a single culprit. It is unclear where exactly the main delay occurred—within the Ministry of Justice, between the civilian and military prosecutor’s offices, in budgetary procedures, in agreeing on hiring conditions, or at several stages at once. Therefore, the formula ‘the trial was disrupted’ today would be as inaccurate as the formula ‘there is no problem at all.’
There is another reason why the issue cannot be reduced to a bureaucratic dispute over staff. According to Israeli media reports, the prosecution is preparing to seek the death penalty in some of the most serious cases. This means that the cost of a weak indictment, a procedural error, or insufficiently reliable individualization of guilt becomes especially high: such decisions will inevitably undergo extremely rigorous judicial scrutiny.
What a two-year delay means for victims, witnesses, and Israel
For the court, it is not enough to establish the general fact of the Hamas attack and the scale of the crimes of October 7. This is already documented by thousands of testimonies, videos, and other materials. But a criminal charge must do a more complex thing: legally link a specific defendant to specific actions or prove such a form of participation that allows for personal criminal responsibility to be imposed on them.
Here, time really matters. A digital record does not forget what it saw, but a person can. Years later, it is harder for witnesses to recall secondary details, the sequence of events, and the features of a specific person, and the defense has more opportunities to argue about the accuracy of memories, identification conditions, and the connection of the accused to a specific episode. This does not mean the automatic destruction of the evidence base, but it well explains why the prosecution perceives another two years as a serious threat.
For the families of the deceased, released hostages, and survivors, there is another layer. The special court was conceived not only as a mechanism for imposing punishments but also as a state legal consolidation of what happened: with testimonies, examined evidence, court decisions, and an archive. The public and historical documentation of the massacre is already enormous, but a judicially established picture for specific defendants has not yet been created.
Finally, the story with the twenty prosecutors becomes a test for the state institutions of Israel themselves. The country has already spent political resources on a special law and committed to directing more than a billion shekels to the process infrastructure. If after this, the deadlines are extended for years precisely because the departments failed to timely coordinate personnel, funding, and powers, the issue will be not only in the unprecedented complexity of the investigation.
As of August 12, 2026, the correct status of the case looks like this: the trial of the terrorists of October 7 has not been officially postponed for two years. The military prosecutor’s office warns that at least such a delay will occur if they are not given an experienced team of 20 prosecutors, and the initial target for the first indictments—January 2027—will then become unattainable. If the warning is implemented literally, it may already be about 2029, but the state has not yet announced a new official calendar.
After the Knesset returns to work, Simcha Rothman and Yulia Malinovskaya intend to demand explanations and a practical solution to the staffing issue from the responsible structures. Therefore, the nearest real indicator of the state’s readiness for this process will not be another statement about its historical significance or a new budget figure, but a formed prosecution team and the first indictments for the crimes of October 7.