https://www.newsmax.com/world/globaltalk/israel-hostages-intelligence/2024/02/06/id/1152488/By Eric Mack | Tuesday, 06 February 2024 01:57 PM EST
Israel's chief military spokesperson Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said Tuesday that 31 of the remaining hostages held in Gaza were pronounced dead.
"We have informed 31 families that their captured loved ones are no longer among the living and that we have pronounced them dead," he told a regular media briefing.
Israel has said 136 hostages are still being held in Gaza.
The announcement came hours after an Israeli intelligence report concluded more than a fifth of the remaining 136 hostages held by Hamas are dead, The New York Times reported Tuesday.
It was a confidential internal Israeli intelligence report reviewed by the Times.
Further intelligence, but unconfirmed, suggests there could be at least 20 more dead hostages, according to Times sources. Also, the report found, most of the 31 dead hostages died in the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack on Israel.
While the Biden administration is pushing for Israel to end its operation on Hamas in Gaza, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been resolute the war on Hamas will not end until three objectives are reached: 1. Return all hostages; 2. Eradicate Hamas; 3. Demilitarize and de-radicalize Gaza.
Biden recently used a profane term to call Netanyahu a "bad [bleeping] guy," according to reports.
Netanyahu, though, continues to press on in searching for hostages and Hamas terrorists in Gaza, and reports indicate the operation to root out Hamas terrorists in Khan Younis might be less than a week away.
Hamas took hostages from Israel after its Oct. 7 terrorist attacks to use them as human shields and leverage against Israel's subsequent retaliation on Gaza, as terrorists do, Israel officials have told Newsmax.
Among the human shielding in Gaza, Hamas has used hospitals and children's schools to either keep the Israeli Defense Forces from rooting them out or use the deaths of civilians to spin media and United Nations sentiment against their longtime rivals in Israel.
It has worked in the sense there is a groundswell of support for Gaza, including from the U.N. and even the Biden administration in pushing for a cease-fire, ostensibly telling Israel it should stop its effort to secure its border from decades-running violence from Gaza.
There was one temporary cease-fire deal in early December that returned almost half of the 240 hostages taken, but Hamas has held the remaining hostages — without confirming their health and existence — in order to push for more time to retreat in the relentless war, according to Israel.
Hamas' human shields campaign has also led to hostage families pushing Israel to stop the onslaught, because they fear their loved one's lives would be put in further danger, according to the Times.
The Israeli Defense Forces maintained in a statement to the Times it was "deploying all available resources to locate and retrieve as much information as possible regarding the hostages currently held by Hamas."
Information from Reuters was used to update this report.
Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
That is the latest I'm aware of on this question. So IDF confirms 31 of them now dead. Last I had heard I think it was 20 something.
