The IDF's apparatus for addressing the captivity of some 200 Israeli hostages in Gaza is strongly operational, despite much of the public coverage revolving around updating numbers and talking to families.
That means that critical intelligence which the apparatus, run by IDF Maj. Gen. (res.) Nitzan Alon and Maj. Gen. (res.) Lior Carmi, collects gets passed on to IDF combat operations teams, the Shin Bet (Israel Security Service), and the Mossad for potential future rescue operations.
In that vein, there have been serious questions about whether the IDF would exercise greater restraint for some of its operations against Gazan terror groups to avoid killing the hostages.
This was especially true after a senior Israeli diplomatic source on October 9 said that the IDF would strike Gaza without holding back too much to avoid hitting Israeli hostages whom Hamas took.
In general, the source did not put much emphasis on negotiating for a return of the hostages now, with the clear focus being on prosecuting the war against Hamas.
Despite those statements, top IDF commanders in the field are absolutely not giving up on trying to rescue Israeli hostages, even as they hit Hamas hard.
The IDF is not revealing its classified procedures for how soldiers will deal with situations when they suddenly encounter an Israeli hostage situation up close in the field during the impending invasion.
Fully committed to the invasion
Alon said on Thursday, "All of my soul and brain are committed to this, with hundreds of people. We will not stop for a moment until we find any way possible to return our dear ones to us.”
“Our efforts are complex, difficult and challenging. It includes intelligence and operational challenges, during which we analyze and extrapolate every piece of information,” said Alon.
The IDF hostage recovery apparatus chief said, “We work with the families, the villages, and the communities. Along with me, there are hundreds of top personnel from the special forces and the entire intelligence and defense community. We are all working diligently day and night, and within our power, we have the most advanced intelligence and technological means.”
The IDF also noted that there are top civilian minds from the hi-tech community, some reservists and some not, along with the police, and other civilian teams that are working with them on the issue, including building special algorithms and facial recognition platforms.
While the number of estimated kidnapped persons is currently around 200, the number of children in that group is slightly under 30 and the number of elderly is between 10-20, depending on different definitions.
Of those 200, the vast majority have been identified with a high level of intelligence certainty, but there is a group about which there is less clarity.
Some of the uncertainty revolves around bodies that still have not been identified and are undergoing DNA testing.
There are still some unrecovered bodies on both the Israeli and Gazan sides of the border, and since both Hamas terrorists and Israeli civilians were dressed like civilians, identification can be complex and take time.
The IDF said that it has gotten much better at speeding up both the identification process and the process for notifying families regarding what it knows about.
There are also unusual cases where someone was videoed kidnapped, but later evidence showed they might have been killed on the way to Gaza, or might have succeeded in fleeing Hamas, but may not yet have reported to the IDF or their families.
Status of foreign nationals
The status of some foreign workers and of foreign citizens from around nine countries is also sometimes more complex to clarify without as much close-by help from families to identify people or look over the information.
Occasionally, some information is also being used to confuse Hamas about what the IDF knows, though generally, the main focus is to tell families privately whatever the IDF knows at any given point, including flagging points of uncertainty.
There is an immense amount of data to go through, from huge amounts of open-source cell phone videos, to police cameras, to more classified surveillance systems which sometimes picked up useful information indirectly.
The IDF would admit that they started slow in some areas, but noted that the challenge of identifying and recovering kidnapped persons is harder than it was even during the Yom Kippur War. Egypt was a government that could be worked with normally in terms of prisoner exchanges of soldiers, but Hamas, which also took civilians, is not.
The military is also working with former IDF Brig.-Gen. Gal Hirsch, who was appointed by the government to handle diplomatic negotiations regarding the hostages.