During the Israel-Hamas War, the IDF sometimes avoided killing certain Gazan terrorists who knew where Israeli hostages were being held, a senior IDF Intelligence Corps commander reported Thursday.
This disclosure resolved a two-year mystery of how Israel managed to kill Hamas’s leaders while not losing the ability to locate the hostages. At the start of the war, some officials worried that Hamas leaders Yahya Sinwar and Mohammed Deif might be immune from elimination because they could be the only ones who knew certain hostage information.
“There is always a dual dilemma” about whether to “let security forces kill terrorists to remove a threat” versus intentionally avoiding killing them to continue gaining intelligence from them, or in this case, use them to maintain updated intelligence and rescue possibilities regarding hostages, the IDF Intelligence officer said.
Furthermore, regarding Ran Gvili, “Hamas never knew where he was,” he said. “Islamic Jihad did not even know.”
This admission was notable given multiple comments by Israeli political officials in recent weeks that Islamic Jihad did know where Gvili was buried and raised questions about whether the issue was being used to push back on Trump administration pressure to proceed with aspects of Phase 2 of the ceasefire plan.
“We had a few different scenarios,” the commander said. “One was that maybe he was [mistakenly] buried with Gazans in October 2023. We needed to figure out where in eastern Gaza City, which locations needed to be identified and studied.” IDF Intelligence’s hostage center accomplished that with help from Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) interrogations, he said.
Intel official: 'I didn't think we would get all of the hostages back'
“I didn’t think we would get all of the hostages back,” the commander said, adding that bringing back Gvili, the last hostage, was a testament to the amazing effort of more than 2,000 personnel who worked at the hostage center over the course of the war.
Next, the IDF officer did not want to analyze how internal Israeli politics or foreign diplomatic factors might have delayed earlier potential opportunities to bring Gvili’s body back.
But he said the operation had been huge and complex, and that the military always needed to weigh the costs and risks of such an operation against the likelihood or unlikelihood of success.
About a month ago, more information was received, and then days before the operation, even more, which substantially increased the likelihood of success, he said.
Another new detail the intelligence official added about the Gvili episode was that the Islamic Jihad official whom the Shin Bet had interrogated to get the latest information was not the person who originally transported Gvili’s body into Gaza on a motorcycle, but someone else who was later given the body.
Regarding the Mossad, the IDF Intelligence officer said while most of its involvement was in negotiations, it had some input in operations as well.
Commenting on some unique intelligence challenges, the senior IDF intelligence officer said the methods of research and operations used for following and rescuing live hostages were completely different from those for deceased hostages’ remains and required separate units for special expertise.
For example, living hostages were moved much more often, and the risk of them being killed by their guards was an additional, highly complex factor, he said.
This was one of the reasons that dozens of deceased hostages were brought back in army operations, but fewer than 10 live hostages were brought back by IDF rescues, the IDF officer said.
Gaza City guards moved their hostages around much more often than hostage guards did in other parts of Gaza, although hostages were also moved there, he said.
In general, the IDF Intelligence officer viewed the hostage center as highly successful, but he discussed failures as well.
There was a failed operation to try to rescue Sahar Baruch, he said.
In addition, there were many operations for which significant investment went into training and preparing, but which were called off due to changing circumstances or intelligence.
Moreover, some operations had played out fully, but when the IDF arrived at a given location, it learned that the intelligence had been wrong, and there was no hostage present.
After the December 2023 incident in which IDF soldiers had mistakenly killed three hostages, the hostage center carried out a significant refining process for training soldiers in Gaza how to act in different scenarios with potential hostages.
After the August 2024 incident in which Hamas killed six Israeli hostages while the IDF was operating nearby, the army raised its standards, prohibiting operations in areas unless it had not only older intelligence on whether hostages were present, but also updated intelligence, the IDF officer said.
Over the course of the first two weeks of the war, the IDF succeeded in reducing uncertainty about the fate of 3,000 Israelis to between 200 to 300, and by December 2024, the IDF knew the status of all missing persons definitively, he said.