Daily Mail: Only 40 Israeli hostages in Gaza remain alive

The Daily Mail newspaper reported in a report on Sunday that fears are growing in Israel that only about 40 of the 133 hostages remaining in the hands of Hamas since October 7 are still alive.

The report merely quoted a statement by a “source” who said that access to intelligence information “has become much easier than it was before October 7, when our access to Gaza was limited and we didn’t have many possibilities regarding sources”.

The report claimed that this assessment was based on intelligence information collected by the Israeli internal security service, the Shin Bet, but the latter denied the validity of this claim.

Israeli media quoted a comment from the Shin Bet in which he said that “the aforementioned report is incorrect and doesn’t agree with the Shin Bet’s opinion,” and that the numbers mentioned in it “are the opinion of the writer only and are not based on information reported by the Shin Bet”.

This report came less than two weeks before US officials told the Wall Street Journal that they estimate that most of the hostages who were held by armed groups in the Gaza Strip are no longer alive.

At the same time, CNN reported that Hamas informed the mediators within the framework of the hostage negotiations that it didn’t have 40 hostages alive who meet the criteria for release in the first phase of a new prisoner exchange deal between the two sides, according to an Israeli source, In addition to another source familiar with the details.

For his part, the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that of the 129 hostages who were being held, 33 of them were killed.

It’s noteworthy that so far, 112 hostages have been returned to Israel, in a prisoner exchange deal, followed by the continuation of fighting for the sixth month in a row, with expectations of an imminent attack on Rafah, the last stronghold of Hamas, amid warnings issued by Egypt, the United States, and some Western countries, given that the city is at the same time a refuge.

The negotiations regarding the release of the hostages are witnessing difficulties that hinder reaching an agreement, with a clear discrepancy in the Israeli demands on the one hand, and those put forward by Hamas, which is concerned with the withdrawal of the Israeli army from the Gaza Strip and stopping the fighting before proceeding with the release of the hostages, which Israel rejects.