The presence of scores of captives in Gaza, a large majority of them civilians, increases the risks involved in a possible Israeli invasion
Neither the Israeli government nor Hamas, the militant group that controls Gaza and launched Saturday’s attack, has said exactly how many people are being held in Gaza, but the issue has wracked families in Israel and abroad, and looms large as Israel prepares for a possible invasion.
In total, The Post found visual evidence that Palestinian fighters took at least 106 people captive during the incursion. Beside those who appeared to be taken to Gaza, 26 captives were seen being held in locations that could not be verified, and 16 were seen only in Israel. Hamas has said that it holds “tens” of people. Israeli authorities have said they estimate that Palestinian fighters took between 100 and 150 people hostage.
The actual number of people taken hostage and soldiers taken prisoner in Gaza by Palestinian fighters is almost certainly higher than those seen in the videos and pictures reviewed by The Post. Neither Hamas nor the Israeli military immediately responded to requests for comment.
The Post reviewed hundreds of videos and images posted on social media since the fighting began. To assess whether captives were taken to Gaza, The Post geolocated some images that featured those individuals or relied more generally on visual indicators such as visible surroundings or the fact that they were being transported by armed Palestinian fighters celebrating their capture. In many cases, family members of captives confirmed that they were taken to Gaza.
In several instances, the visual evidence did not provide enough information to determine whether a captive had been taken to Gaza, and other abductions reported in the media have not been captured in videos or photographs at all.
The videos reviewed by The Post show a mother and her children driven off in a truck, foreign workers held in a subterranean room and young people taken from an all-night desert rave attacked shortly after dawn on Saturday. In one case, fighters used a woman’s phone to livestream themselves abducting her, her husband and three children from their home in Nahal Oz, a kibbutz. The Post viewed the livestream and matched the clothes worn by one of the daughters to images later posted by pro-Hamas Telegram accounts of the same girl being held in an unidentifiable room.
The images show captives being taken from numerous locations across a swath of territory more than 20 miles wide, from the village of Nir Oz in the south to the main Erez border crossing in the north, reflecting the broad sweep of Hamas’s incursion across nearly the entire Gaza border in southern Israel.
The question of how many people are being held by Hamas, allied armed groups and others in Gaza will be crucial in coming days. Not since the war between Israel and neighboring Arab states in 1973 have so many Israeli civilians or soldiers been held captive. On Monday, Hamas threatened to execute a hostage for every Israeli airstrike that targets Palestinians in their homes “without warning.” The Israeli military continues to bomb sites across Gaza as it prepares for a potential invasion that could put hostages in the middle of a devastating ground war. The air campaign has so far killed 1,100 Palestinians and wounded 5,339, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health.
Hamas itself has lost contact with some of its fighters holding captives, and Gazan civilians also took hostages on their own, the Wall Street Journal reported Sunday, citing a senior Hamas official and Egyptian officials. The “complete siege” of Gaza declared by Israeli officials will, if continued, also cause conditions in the strip to deteriorate rapidly.
Some of the the videos reviewed by The Post show Palestinian fighters taking captives from several small towns just a few miles from the Gaza border, several of which were the scene of mass killings of civilians.
In one widely publicized case, a video shows a man carrying a child down a road, surrounded by armed Palestinian fighters.
The Post spoke with Gaya Kalderon, a 21-year-old woman from southern Israel, who said the boy in the video was her younger brother, 12-year-old Erez. The video was filmed near her father’s house in the kibbutz of Nir Oz, she said. The Post independently confirmed the location in the video.
Kalderon’s brother was hiding in the family’s safe room along with her father, sister, cousin and grandmother during the attack, she said. They are all missing.
Another widely circulated video showed an elderly woman being driven by armed fighters through Gaza in a golf cart as women can be heard shouting greetings to her.
Adva Adar, who lives in Israel, told The Post that the woman was her 85-year-old grandmother, Yafa, who is ill and takes medicine, including for pain management.
“We don’t know how long she can stay without her medicine,” Adar said.
Though around three-fourths of the people whom Palestinian fighters took to Gaza appeared to be civilians, fighters also took soldiers prisoner during their attacks on military posts.
One dawn attack on the Erez border crossing in Gaza’s north was recorded on video and published on Hamas’s official Telegram account. It shows Palestinian fighters capturing three men alleged to be Israeli soldiers.
A still image taken from the attack shows them pulling one of the captured men through a gap in the concrete wall separating Israel and Gaza.
On Monday morning, a Telegram account that supports Hamas’s military wing and often circulates information about its actions posted the name, picture and military identification number of one of the three men and said he had been killed in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza.
The United Nations secretary general, António Guterres, has called for the release of all captured civilians. The organization’s human rights chief denounced the abductions, saying hostage-taking is forbidden under international law.
Palestinian fighters also brought at least eight bodies back into Gaza, including what appeared to be at least six slain soldiers, according to The Post’s analysis. In the past, the bodies of Israeli soldiers have been part of prisoner exchange negotiations between the two sides.
In the conflict’s last major prisoner exchange, in 2011, Hamas exchanged Gilad Shalit, a corporal who had been taken prisoner in an attack on an Israeli post five years earlier, for around 1,000 jailed Palestinians. During the 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict, Hamas took the bodies of two Israeli soldiers killed in an attack on their armored personnel carrier and holds their remains to this day.
Steve Hendrix and Loveday Morris in Jerusalem, Imogen Piper in London, Sarah Dadouch in Beirut and Meg Kelly in Washington contributed to this report.