Hamas instructs to kill hostages if Israeli forces approach

A new report by the New York Times cited Israeli officials as saying that Hamas terrorist leaders have given standing orders to terrorists who are holding hostages saying “that if they think Israeli forces are coming, the first thing they should do is shoot the captives”.

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

In the rescue operation over Shabbos, Israeli forces raided two buildings where the four hostages were kept simultaneously, out of fear that if Hamas realized an operation was taking place, they would start murdering hostages. The two civilian buildings being used to hold the hostages were about 200 meters apart.

The NYT report also cited current and former US officials as saying that intelligence sharing between Washington and Yerushalayim has expanded beyond just 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 NYT.

Part of this process is intelligence efforts focused on identifying patterns that could help determine optimal 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 as human shields near Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s leader in Gaza.

Sinwar, 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.