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US fears most of Hamas’s remaining captives already dead: Report
US intelligence officials fear most of Hamas’s remaining captives in Gaza are already dead, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.
Hamas kidnapped some 220 people, including foreigners, when it launched its attack on Israel on October 7. After a brief ceasefire that saw some freed in exchange for Palestinians held in Israeli jails, dozens are thought to remain.
Israel estimates about 34 captives have died, but the Journal reported on Thursday that some US officials believe that number should be more than twice as high, which could complicate efforts to reach a new ceasefire deal.
The intelligence sources, who were not identified, said some of the captives died from the injuries they sustained in Hamas’s attack, while others succumbed to illness. Some may also have been killed in Israel’s ongoing assault on the territory, the report said.
War has reached the ‘phase of famine and attrition’
Marc Owen Jones, associate professor of Middle East studies at Hamad Bin Khalifa University, says he does not believe Israel will go into Rafah, despite Netanyahu’s repeated statements that an incursion into the city in southern Gaza is imminent.
“If they do, I think it’ll be a minor incursion. They [Israeli army] pulled troops from Khan Younis on the basis that they said are going to reformulate them, but actually I think that was in response to the World Central Kitchen [workers’] killings,” Owen Jones told Al Jazeera.
“My concern is that the phase that we’re in is this phase of famine and that this is a war of attrition; that Israel is going to continue to use starvation as a weapon against Gazans and see what that will result in,” he added.
‘Atrocious dilemma’ if Palestinians flee to Egypt, UN refugee chief says
The UN refugee chief says “we must fervently do everything” to avoid the prospect of Palestinians fleeing into Egypt from Rafah in southern Gaza because it would make resolving the conflict “impossible”.
“Another refugee crisis from Gaza into Egypt, I can assure you, … would make the resolution of the Palestinian refugee question as a consequence of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict impossible,” High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi told the Reuters news agency at his agency’s headquarters in Geneva.
Netanyahu has said repeatedly Israel will conduct a ground offensive into Rafah, and Grandi says any attack on the city, where 1.4 million Palestinians are sheltering, may make the movement of Palestinians into Egypt “the only option for safety available”.
“But I repeat, we must not arrive at that atrocious dilemma, which would be really almost the end of the road for what is really important here: ultimate peace.”
