THE FOUR HOSTAGES WERE RESCUED ALIVE BECAUSE THEIR GUARDS WERE TAKEN BY SURPRISE AND QUICKLY KILLED

Hamas operatives said to have standing orders to kill hostages if IDF approaches

US officials cited by New York Times say American aircraft have been gathering intel on captives held by terrorists in Gaza since Oct. 7, catching details missed by Israeli drones

 

Times of Israel

Jun 10, 2024

 

 

Troops carry out operations as part of the raid to rescue four hostages in the Gaza Strip, released for publication on June 9, 2024

 

Hamas terrorist leaders have given standing orders to operatives who are holding hostages saying “that if they think Israeli forces are coming, the first thing they should do is shoot the captives,” according to Israeli officials quoted by The New York Times on Monday.

Two days after the Israel Defense Forces’ rescue of four hostages from Nuseirat in central Gaza, the newspaper reported that if other hostages were killed on Saturday, as Hamas has claimed, “it might have been at the hand of the [terrorists], not because of an Israeli airstrike.”

The IDF has directly rejected a Hamas claim that three hostages were killed by Israeli airstrikes, the report noted.

The two buildings where the four hostages were kept were about 200 meters apart, and a decision by security forces to go for both simultaneously on Saturday was due to the concern that Hamas may murder the hostages after identifying the rescue operation at the other location.

The Times also reported on Washington’s contributions to hostage-rescue efforts since almost immediately after Hamas’s October 7 massacre in southern Israel, quoting US officials as saying that “the sheer numbers of American aircraft” gathering intelligence over Gaza have been able to surface information that Israeli drones missed.

“At least six MQ-9 Reapers controlled by Special Operations forces have been involved in flying missions to monitor for signs of life,” the officials were quoted as saying.

The war in Gaza erupted with Hamas’s October 7 onslaught in southern Israel, which saw some 3,000 terrorists burst across the border, killing some 1,200 people and seizing 251 hostages amid rampant brutality and sexual assault.

It is believed that 116 hostages abducted on October 7 remain in Gaza — though dozens are thought dead — after 105 civilians were released from Hamas captivity during a weeklong truce in late November, and four hostages were released prior to that. Seven hostages have been rescued by troops alive, and the bodies of 19 hostages have been recovered, including three mistakenly killed by the military.

While Israel is using ground-based sensors to map out the vast Hamas tunnel network underneath Gaza, which the drones cannot do, the aircrafts’ infrared radar “can detect the heat signatures of fighters or other people going into or out of tunnel entrances on the surface,” the report noted.

The report cited current and former US officials as saying that intelligence sharing between Washington and Jerusalem has expanded beyond hostage-recovery efforts. Overall, the US and the UK “are part of the largest intelligence effort ever conducted in Israel, and probably ever,” Avi Kalo, a lieutenant colonel in the IDF reserves, told the paper.

Intelligence efforts also focus on identifying patterns that could help determine timing for possible hostage rescue operations, the report said, such as “trying to learn how long Hamas holds people in one place before moving them to another.”

A “small group of hostages” are believed to be held near Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s leader in Gaza, serving as human shields and making it harder for Israel to target him, the Times reported.

Sinwar, according to the report, hid in tunnels below Rafah for a while, but is now “likely back under Khan Younis,” where there is a vast subterranean network. “Neither the United States nor Israel has been able to fix his precise location,” a US official was quoted as saying.

“Early in the war, some intelligence officials believed most hostages were being held in tunnels,” the report said. That may no longer be the case, since “living underground has proved tough for Hamas commanders, and… keeping hostages in the apartments of supporters of the organization has turned out to be easier.”

In the wake of the successful Israeli rescue operation on Saturday, however, Hamas is expected to move more hostages into tunnels and potentially out of reach of commando forces, the paper said. “And it is not clear how many more opportunities for rescue raids there will be, at least above ground ones.”

Noa Argamani, 26, Almog Meir Jan, 21, Andrey Kozlov, 27, and Shlomi Ziv, 40, were rescued on Saturday when Israeli commandos simultaneously raided two Hamas-controlled multistory buildings in the heart of Nuseirat. They had been abducted from the Supernova music festival near Kibbutz Re’im on the morning of October 7.

A rescue team commander was fatally wounded in the operation.

The IDF has confirmed the deaths of 41 of the hostages still held by Hamas, citing new intelligence and findings obtained by troops operating in Gaza. One more person is listed as missing since October 7, and their fate is still unknown.

Hamas is also holding two Israeli civilians who entered the Strip in 2014 and 2015, as well as the bodies of two IDF soldiers who were killed in 2014.