Israeli spies fear only 40 hostages still alive

ONLY around 40 of the 133 hostages held by Hamas are now thought to be alive, it is feared.

The figure is based on intelligence gathered by agents from Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security agency.

A source said: ‘It [intelligence] is much easier to access than before October 7 when we had limited access to Gaza and we didn’t have a lot of possibilities of sources there or recruitment.

Now, the situation is completely different because we are there and can offer a lot to anyone we wish to recruit. It’s a completely different ball game.’

Additional intelligence comes from captured terrorists and is fed into a knowledge bank held by the Israeli task force analysing information relating to the hostage situation.

Since Hamas killed more than 1,200 people and took some 240 hostages to Gaza last year, Israel’s retaliation has left 33,000 Palestinians dead, says Hamas. Israel says 14,000 of them were Hamas operatives.

‘Hamas is trying to keep everything very secret... They will never release all the hostages and corpses. They’ll hide behind the fact that they don’t know,’ said the source.

There were roughly 240 hostages – soldiers and civilians – taken from southern Israel into Gaza on October 7. So far 112 hostages have been returned alive to Israel – 105 were released as part of an exchange last year.

Before that, Hamas released four prisoners unilaterally, while three more were rescued by the Israel Defence Forces.

Meanwhile, authorities said yesterday that an Israeli air strike on a house in Gaza’s southernmost city killed at least nine people, six of them children. The strike late on Friday hit a residential building in Rafah.