Israel denies Hamas leader fled to Egypt with hostages via tunnels

ISRAEL has denied reports that Hamas’s leader and his brother may have escaped with some hostages into Egypt’s Sinai desert.

Security sources in Saudi Arabia said Israeli officials believed Yahya and Mohammed Sinwar fled through a tunnel using captives as human shields.

The Israeli army denied the reports, made in the Elaph newspaper, saying it did not have any information about the Hamas leader fleeing.

Speculation about Hamas’s leadership and the hostages’ whereabouts have flourished since the beginning of the war, but Israel still estimates that the remaining 134 hostages are in Gaza.

According to Yoav Gallant, the defence minister, Hamas members no longer trust their leadership’s handling of the war. “Hamas-gaza is MIA, there is no one to talk to among leadership on the ground. That means there is a tender [in Hamas] for who will run Gaza,” Mr Gallant said.

The IDF estimates that 18 of Hamas’s 24 battalions in Gaza have been destroyed while 12,000 of the terror group’s members have been killed in Gaza and another 1,000 inside Israel in the first days after Oct 7.

Hamas, on the other hand, revealed for the first time since it started the war that it estimated around 6,000 of its members have been killed.

“Hamas is left with marginal [forces] in the central camps and with the Rafah Brigade, and what stands between them and a collapse as a military system is a decision by the IDF,” Mr Gallant said.

The IDF said on Monday its forces continued to operate against terrorists in northern, central and southern Gaza, but that yet another brigade was being pulled out of Gaza after it “completed its mission”.

Thousands of soldiers have been pulled from Gaza in recent weeks, some of whom have been relocated to Israel’s northern border with Lebanon which suffers daily attacks by Hezbollah.

In Gaza, the IDF is preparing for the last large offensive in Rafah, a city where an estimated 1.3 million Palestinians are sheltering.

War cabinet member Benny Gantz warned Hamas that if the hostages are not released before Ramadan in three weeks, the IDF would enter Rafah.

“The world must know, and Hamas leaders must know: if by Ramadan our hostages are not home, the fighting will continue to the Rafah area,” Mr Gantz said on Sunday.