“I estimate that in the coming days we will know whether we can reach an agreement for the release of our hostages,” said army chief of staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir, according to a military statement.
“If not, the combat will continue without rest,” he said, during remarks to officers inside Gaza on Friday.. Footage released by the Israeli military showed Zamir meeting soldiers and officers in a command center.
Of the 251 people who were kidnapped from Israel during Hamas’s attack in October 2023, 49 remain in Gaza, 27 of them dead, according to the military.
Palestinian armed groups this week released two videos of hostages looking emaciated and weak.
Negotiations – mediated by the United States, Egypt and Qatar – to secure a ceasefire and their release broke down last month, and some in Israel have called for tougher military action.
This comes against the backdrop of growing pressure – both internationally and domestically, including from many of the hostages’ families – to resume efforts to secure a ceasefire in the nearly 22-month conflict.
Aid agencies have meanwhile warned that Gaza’s population is facing a catastrophic famine, triggered by Israeli restrictions on aid. Zamir nonetheless rejected these allegations out of hand.
“The current campaign of false accusations of intentional starvation is a deliberate, timed, and deceitful attempt to accuse the IDF (military), a moral army, of war crimes,” he said.
“The ones responsible for the killing and suffering of the residents in the Gaza Strip is Hamas.”
Hamas’s 2023 attack resulted in the deaths of 1,219 people, mostly civilians, according to a tally based on official figures.A total of 898 Israeli soldiers have also been killed since ground troops were sent into Gaza, according to the military.
Israel’s campaign in Gaza has killed at least 60,332 people in Gaza, mostly civilians, according to figures from the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry, deemed reliable by the UN.
The armed wing of Palestinian militant group Islamic Jihad published a video of an Israeli-German hostage who was abducted to Gaza in October 2023 during the attack that sparked the Gaza war.
In the six-minute video, the male hostage, speaking in Hebrew, is seen watching recent news footage of the hunger crisis in Gaza. He identifies himself and pleads with the Israeli government to secure his release.
AFP was not immediately able to confirm the authenticity of the video nor the date it was filmed, but was able — along with several Israeli news outlets — to identify the hostage as Rom Braslavksi, a German-Israeli dual national.
Islamic Jihad announced last week that it had lost contact with the hostage and repeats this in commentary at the beginning of the latest video, suggesting the images were filmed more than a week ago
Originally from Jerusalem, Braslavski was a security agent at the Nova music festival, one of the sites attacked in October 2023 by Hamas and other Palestinian fighters, including members of Islamic Jihad.
The footage, distributed by a movement considered a terrorist organization by the United States and the European Union, shows the young man watching an Arabic-language television channel broadcasting a report on hunger in Gaza.
Before his abduction, he rescued several festivalgoers, according to witnesses who managed to escape.
Of the 251 people taken from Israel that day, 49 are still held in Gaza, 27 of whom are dead, according to the Israeli army.
Israel has been fighting Hamas in Gaza since the kidnappings, but a truce from January 19 to March 17 allowed the return of 33 hostages to Israel, eight of them dead, in exchange for the release of approximately 1,800 Palestinians from Israeli jails.