Caged hostages kept near Hamas leaders in Gaza tunnels as ‘protection’ - report
An official from the terror group’s political branch says protecting Yahya Sinwar and other leaders ‘is the right of any leadership or any resistance'
Israeli hostages were held in cages by Hamas, in tunnels deep under the Gaza Strip’s city of Khan Yunis, as part of the terrorist organization’s efforts to protect its top leadership, NBC News reported on Thursday.
“I think that this is the right of any leadership or any resistance,” an unnamed Hamas political official told NBC News, regarding efforts to protect Yahya Sinwar and other top leaders in Gaza.
According to the report, current and former Israeli officials told NBC News that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) found cages that held hostages as human shields around where Sinwar and other Hamas leaders had been hiding out.
The report described the underground hideouts as “carefully protected by layers of Israeli captives and lower-tier Hamas fighters,” adding that Sinwar likely stayed on the move in order to avoid detection.
“It is a fair assumption that Sinwar and Hamas leadership were close to where those hostages were kept — and then they all moved on,” an IDF reserve spokesperson, Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan Conricus, told NBC News. “I think being close to hostages has saved his life more than once.”
Furthermore, the terrorist organization took “great pains” to avoid Israeli intelligence services being able to snoop on Sinwar’s communications with Hamas leadership abroad, primarily in Qatar’s capital Doha, even throughout the November hostage release negotiations.
Amid increased back-and-forth for a new hostage release deal, Qatar reportedly conveyed to Israel on Wednesday that Hamas suspended the talks due to their insistence of a complete withdrawal of the Israeli army from the Gaza Strip in the initial phase of any agreement.