Gaza: Hamas blames Israel for deaths of ‘many’ hostages ‘probably killed recently’

Some have “entered the tunnel of the unknown.” Hamas’s military wing said on Sunday that “many” of the hostages “were likely killed recently” and held Israel “fully responsible” for their fate. “The fate of many hostages has been unknown in recent weeks, while others have entered a tunnel of uncertainty,” Abu Obeida, a spokesman for Hamas’s military wing, said in a televised address. “Many of them have probably been killed recently, and the rest are in great danger,” for which “the enemy leadership and his army bear full responsibility,” he continued.

Of the roughly 250 hostages abducted Oct. 7 in southern Israel by Hamas and its allies, about a hundred were released in exchange for Palestinian prisoners during a truce in fighting in late November. But 132 people were missing, according to Israeli authorities, who determined that 25 had died and their bodies had never been returned.

“War of Religion”

Abu Obeida warned that “allied groups within the Axis of Resistance” would “increase their attacks” on Israeli troops in the coming days. Hamas appears, in particular, along with its Lebanese ally Hezbollah in this collection of armed groups created by Iran and hostile to Israel and its American ally. “After one hundred days of battle,” “the enemy leadership is struggling to swallow its pain and wallows in the mud of its failures,” the spokesman added.

He also accused Israel of waging an “apparent religious war” and destroying “most of the mosques in the Gaza Strip” in a hundred days: “It desecrated, burned and bulldozed those that its vehicles reached on the ground,” he said. Abu Obeida.

The war in Gaza was sparked by attacks carried out on October 7 by Islamist commandos from Hamas and its allies that killed about 1,140 people, mostly civilians, according to an Agence France-Presse tally based on Israeli data. Since October 7, about 24,000 people have been killed in Gaza, most of them women and minors, and about 60,000 others have been injured, according to the Hamas Health Ministry.