Former hostage chief: Rescue missions were called off to avoid risking captives

Brig. Gen. (res.) Gal Hirsch detailed canceled missions, Qatar’s role and Hamas strategy in interview.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

Brig. Gen. (res.) Gal Hirsch, Israel’s former coordinator for hostages and missing persons, revealed new details about canceled rescue operations, Qatar’s role in negotiations, and Hamas’ plan to hold captives for up to a decade in a Friday interview with Israel Hayom’s digital platform.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asked Hirsch to take on the role the day after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led invasion of southern Israel, when chaos still reigned and about 3,200 people were initially listed as missing.

By the second week, that number had dropped to 1,060 and later to 400, he said.

It took 10 months for forensic teams to identify the last victim of the massacre.

Hirsch built his coordination office on the fly, with about 2,000 people working for him at its height of operations, coordinating intelligence and negotiation efforts as well as maintaining constant contact with the families of the 251 hostages being held in Gaza.

Those included four captives from 2014 and 2015: the slain Lt. Hadar Goldin and St. Sgt. Oron Shaul from Operation Protective Edge, and two live, mentally unstable civilians, Avera Mengistu and Hisham al-Sayed, who had crossed into Gaza on their own.

Hirsch said he did not believe Israel would recover all the hostages.

“We classified the captives into ‘Ron Arads’ – those who we suspected would never be found; ‘Wachsmans’ – those whose locations we knew but with a low chance of rescue; ‘Regevs and Goldwassers’ – the dead; and ‘Shalits’ – those who could be returned through a deal,” he said.

Arad was an IAF aviator shot down during the First Lebanon War who disappeared, possibly taken to Iran by Hezbollah terrorists.

Nachshon Wachsman, a soldier abducted by Palestinian terrorists from a traffic junction in 1994, was murdered by his captors during a failed rescue attempt.

Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser were IDF soldiers killed by Hezbollah during a 2006 cross-border attack that sparked the Second Lebanon War; their bodies were returned in a prisoner exchange in 2008.

Gilad Shalit was captured alive by Hamas terrorists in a cross-border attack in 2006 and exchanged five years later for 1,027 Palestinian terrorists.

Many hostage rescues were planned, Hirsch noted, with some being canceled even as they were underway.

“There were times when our unit was at the door, but we knew we wouldn’t get the seconds essential for a rescue, so we gave up,” he said.

In other cases, intelligence was not deemed complete enough to assure success or commanders feared an operation would endanger other hostages nearby, leading proposals to be shelved.

Hirsch sharply criticized Qatar, which offered to serve as a mediator early in the war. He challenged the Qataris to demonstrate their influence over Hamas, after which four hostages were released: an American mother and daughter, followed by two elderly Israeli women.

But Qatar — which has given Hamas billions of dollars over the years that funded terror training and a vast tunnel network — was not an honest broker, he noted.

“You know what killed me?” Hirsch said. “The huge gap between what I saw in the [intelligence] material and in the negotiating rooms. Inside, they demanded complete surrender, and to the world they said that Israel is being uncooperative.”

“The peak was during Ramadan: [Hamas head Yahya] Sinwar planned an ‘Al-Aqsa Flood 2’ but they blamed us, saying that our refusal to implement a cease-fire during the fast was torpedoing a deal.”

Hamas named its Oct. 7 invasion “Al-Aqsa Flood” to portray the mass slaughter of nearly 1,200 men, women and children as a defense of the Al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount.

Hirsch revealed that Sinwar had planned to hold onto the hostages for as long as a decade to pressure Israel, and repeatedly shifted demands to prevent negotiations from succeeding.

The terrorists also viewed weekly mass rallies in Israel for the hostages as a “significant tool” in their strategy, he said.

“Every Saturday afternoon, a Hamas video clip came out with slogans that came out of here [Israel] – ‘Time is running out,’ ‘They won’t came back except in a deal’ – and called for people to come out to demonstrations,” which they knew took place on Saturday nights, Hirsch said.

Hamas also pressured captives to echo those messages in propaganda videos, he said, because the protests were so important to them.