The IDF’s invasion of northern Gaza in October 2023 not only helped eliminate around half of Hamas's total forces in a matter of weeks, but it also led to the return of around 80 hostages from November 23-30, 2023.
That part of the invasion was an across-the-board success in terms of the government's war goals.
In contrast, the invasion of Khan Yunis in December 2023 and of Rafah in May 2024 was highly successful when it came to eliminating the remainder of Hamas’s 24 battalions, but the continuous evidence is that the upshots of these invasions led to dozens of hostages being killed.To be sure, the fault of killing the hostages is with Hamas, which kidnapped them in the first place, and in most cases pulled the trigger, and IDF sources have said that they called off dozens of attacks when intelligence warned commanders that hostages were in the vicinity of the Hamas forces being targeted.However, a cardinal principle that the government and the army repeated throughout the war was that the more military pressure they exerted on Hamas, the more chance for survival there would be for the hostages.
The military’s probe on Wednesday disproved this argument yet again, after several prior incidents that went against this view.
The six murdered hostages
The IDF has now admitted that because it did not know that six hostages were being held in the Hamad part of Khan Yunis on February 14, it maneuvered forces there and undertook airstrikes there, one of which led to the deaths of the hostages.Probably, the Hamas guards killed the hostages when they noticed the IDF was near.But military sources have admitted that if Hamas had not shot the hostages, the airstrikes would have killed them.This follows a September admission by the IDF that Hamas killed six other hostages in Tel Sultan in Rafah when troops got close.Both of these incidents follow earlier ones, such as that of slain hostage Yossi Sharabi.On February 11, the IDF announced that an attack by the air force on Hamas in central Gaza in mid-January likely accidentally also killed Sharabi. He was being held by Hamas in a structure adjacent to the structure that the air force attacked, but IDF intelligence did not know that at the time.The IDF attack on the adjacent structure led to the collapse of the structure in which Sharabi was being held.In mid-September, the IDF published its probe that confirmed that it had mistakenly killed three Israeli hostages along with Hamas northern Gaza brigade chief Ahmed Ghandour during an airstrike on November 10, 2023.The probe found that the place where the bodies were found and their condition, along with the pathological report, a further report by the state’s forensic institute, and operations research into the battlefield situation and activities, all pointed strongly in the direction of the IDF having been responsible for the mistaken killing.Then there is of course the case of the soldiers who mistakenly shot and killed three hostages on December 15, 2023, who were waving a white flag, screamed “help” in Hebrew, and were bare from the waist up.The three, Yotam Chaim, Samer Talalka, and Alon Shamriz, were all taken hostage during Hamas’s October 7 massacre against southern communities.These are only the specific cases where the IDF publicly stated that specific actions it took could be traced to the deaths of specific hostages.Many more hostages have been killed by Hamas since the invasion of Khan Yunis.With the original hostage number standing at 250, and around 88 returned by virtue of the one deal in November 2023 and five small rescue missions, theoretically there could still be 162 live hostages.Yet, we know the government and IDF have admitted that only around 50 hostages are still alive.That means besides the above cases, close to 100 other hostages were killed by Hamas (or maybe some others by Israeli airstrikes), and mostly since the invasion of Khan Yunis or of Rafah.The Jerusalem Post was already told in December after the invasion of Rafah was in full swing that the number of living hostages had likely dropped to somewhere in the 70s. Over the months that came and the invasion of Rafah, that number dropped to 50.So it’s just math: a majority of the hostages were killed after the invasion of Khan Yunis and Rafah, despite promises that these invasions would force Hamas into a deal.One hopes that with the defeat of Hezbollah, the deterring of Iran, and the newly intense pressure from both the Biden and Trump administrations, Israel will at least get back the remaining 50 hostages alive.In this “best case scenario,” this would still only mean getting back around 138 out of 250 hostages, but at least it would improve on the current results where – despite a thorough military defeat of Hama and 14 months of military pressure and war – only 88 living hostages out of 250 have been freed.