IDF ignored clues which could have saved six hostages – report

Farhan al-Qadi told his rescuers that he had heard Hebrew spoken but army kept fighting and Hamas executed them.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

The IDF ignored a clear hint that there were hostages in their area of operations in Gaza in the summer and eventually the group of six were executed by their Hamas captors fearing discovery, Channel 12 reported Saturday.

Farhan al-Qadi, a Bedouin whom Hamas fighters had been abducted on October 7 along with 250 others during their invasion of Israel, was found in a tunnel in Rafah on August 27.

He told his rescuers that a few weeks before his liberation he had heard a woman saying “Good morning” in Hebrew in a tunnel nearby.

He then repeated his assertion to debriefers from Israeli Intelligence a short time later. However, his testimony was doubted, the report said, with the army thinking that he had not heard the voice correctly or that he had been moved to a tunnel further away.

IDF forces continued fighting Hamas terrorists in the same zone, pausing operations in the Tel Sultan neighborhood only on August 31, in a rethink of the possibility that other hostages may indeed be hidden under the ground there.

Several hours later, they found the bodies of six abductees in a narrow, fetid tunnel about a kilometer away from where al-Qadi had been found alone in an underground cell.

Forensic evidence showed that St. Sgt. Ori Danino, Carmel Gat, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Alexander Lubanov, Almog Sarusi, and Eden Yerushalmi had been shot and killed on October 29.

The security services believed that their captors followed an instruction by then-Hamas head Yahya Sinwar to execute captives rather than risk them being saved by approaching IDF forces, a general order given to his forces after four hostages were rescued from the Nuseirat refugee camp in June.

There were also forensic findings of Sinwar having been in the same tunnel as the six at some point, although it was unknown if he had been present at the time of their execution, using them as human shields.

The Channel 12 report came five days after the IDF formally gave the findings of its investigation into the death of the six hostages to their families.

In it, they said that they had ceased operations for 24 hours after finding al-Qadi accidentally, in order to assess whether there could be other hostages in the area.

They had concluded that the likelihood of that was “medium to low,” saying that they had had no solid intelligence indicating otherwise.