More than nine days have passed since the guerrillas of the Islamist group Hamas broke into southern Israel and forcibly took away dozens of people, both Israelis and foreigners or citizens with dual nationality. Some are soldiers, but the vast majority are civilians: men, women and children, including babies or the elderly, who worked, lived or visited villages near Gaza. The families have been sending messages of despair in the media, some regretting that Tel Aviv had not yet confirmed whether their loved ones, missing since October 7, were among the captives.
This is what is known so far about the hostages:
After more than a week of vagueness and after the identification of the bodies found at the site of the attacks by the Islamic Resistance Movement, the Israeli government identified a total of 199 hostages, both civilians and soldiers, which is why it updated the latest balance. official on Sunday that counted 126 people held captive by Hamas in the Strip. “We have informed the families of 199 hostages,” Israeli army chief spokesman Daniel Hagari said Monday.
Although the kidnapping of a dozen people was filmed and broadcast by the Hamas fighters themselves at the time of the attack, evidence to confirm that the large number of missing people is being held in Gaza has been gathered little by little. It has been through the analysis of intelligence data, such as mobile phone traces, or thanks to a series of ground raids that the Israeli army has carried out in the north of the Strip.
In one of these lightning operations last Saturday, a military spokesman admitted to the newspaper Haaretz that they had recovered “corpses” of hostages. According to Hamas, which has threatened to execute them in the event of attacks against civilians, 22 of the captives have already died in Israeli bombings, although this number cannot be verified.
In the hours immediately following the Hamas attack, the identities of some of the captives became known, such as Shani Louk, the young German woman who was participating in the Nova festival, the scene of a massacre of more than 260 people. In addition to her, they also took Noa Argamani, whose images screaming on board a motorcycle went around the world; Hours later, Hamas released a photo of him drinking water in a shelter. Other young people suffered the same fate.
Among the captives there are also entire families, including small children, and elderly people, with a range of ages ranging from 9 months to 85 years, according to the information that has emerged to date. Many of them lived in kibbutzim, Israeli farming communities near the fence surrounding Gaza, some were peace activists.
The list of countries that have been declared missing, many of which have dual nationality, is extensive. Beyond Israel, Argentina tops the list with 15 nationals who are captive or missing, followed by France and the United States, with 13 hostages. Next, there are also Thailand (11 hostages), Ukraine (9), Russia (8), Peru (5), Portugal (4), Canada (3), Philippines (3), Austria (2), Beijing (2) , Chile (1), Turkey (1), Spain (1), Colombia (1), Belarus (1), Romania (1), Nepal (1). According to the BBC, 17 Britons, including minors, have died or are missing, a figure not confirmed by the government.
Amid the chaos of Israel’s incessant bombardment of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, the main difficulty remains locating the hostages. Hamas operates in a very decentralized system of small cells and it itself recognizes that it does not have control of all the hostages. The Islamic Jihad group, independent of Hamas, indicated early last week that it was holding 30 hostages and would not return them until the Palestinian prisoners were freed.
The spokesman for the armed wing of Hamas, Abu Obeida, stated in a statement on the Telegram application that he had hidden “dozens of hostages” in “safe places and tunnels of the resistance”, according to the New York Times. The Palestinian Islamist group uses an underground network of defensive tunnels, many of them under civilian infrastructure, to move undetected and transport weapons.
Hagari assures that the Israeli army is “working day and night” to free them. “Hostage efforts are a national priority,” the military spokesman said Monday. It is military intelligence, and in particular General Nitzan Alon, who heads the operation. To appease widespread criticism over the lack of reliable information about the hostages, Israeli Prime Minister Beniamin Netanyahu appointed Gal Hirsch, a retired general mired in a corruption case, as representative of the families of the captives and missing. His appointment raised some criticism in the country.
In a new and hybrid way, a “thousands of volunteers” platform, combining experts from civil society and reservists from the famous intelligence unit 8200 (a unit belonging to the Intelligence Corps of the Israel Defense Forces) help inside a headquarters to identify and locate the hostages with the DNA tests and other tests provided by family members. Families, for their part, have also banded together and are mobilizing their own resources, including diplomatic ones.
From outside Israel, in addition to a probable mediation by Egypt or Qatar, the historic negotiator between Israel and Hamas, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, also claimed to be in dialogue with the Palestinian Islamist movement.
The taking of such a significant number of hostages suggests that Hamas may want to hold them as bargaining chips for a prisoner exchange, and possibly use them as human shields when Israel begins the ground incursion into Hamas leader Ismail Haniye, who is in Qatar on Tuesday appeared to rule out prisoner exchanges while hostilities persist: “This file will not be opened until the end of the battle,” it stated.
Hamas warned a week ago that it would kill a hostage for every Israeli bomb dropped without warning. A threat that has not stopped the bombing by the Israeli army that has caused at least 2,750 Palestinians dead and 9,700 injured.
