Only around 20 of the Israeli hostages are being held by Hamas and a number of these are being kept in handcuffs as human shields around its leader, Yahya Sinwar, intelligence sources have told the JC. 

According to some reports, the terror chief has surrounded himself with all of the captives underground, though other sources have placed the number much lower. Israel has already had several opportunities to eliminate Sinwar after locating the tunnels in which he was hiding but the attack was not authorised because of the danger to hostages and Palestinian civilians.

The rest of the captives, both living and dead, are believed to be in the hands of smaller terror groups.

It comes after 52-year-old Qaid Farhan Alkadi, from the largely Arab city of Rahat in Southern Israel, was rescued by Shayetet 13, the 401st Brigade, Yahalom, and ISA forces under the command of the 162nd Division in a complex operation in the south of the Gaza Strip on Tuesday.

Concerns about the other Israeli captives, based on information gathered by Israeli intelligence in cooperation with Gazan informants and captured terrorists, affects the complexity of securing a hostage deal, currently the subject of intense negotiations in Qatar.

Many Israeli abductees are being held by a menagerie of smaller terror groups like Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Mujahideen Brigades, the al-Nasser Salah al-Deen Brigades and the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, intelligence sources have claimed.

These groups are locked in a dispute with Yahya Sinwar’s Hamas. While Sinwar is demanding the release of Hamas prisoners as a priority, they want prisoners from their own ranks to also be represented on the list. This has led them to contemplate a coup against Hamas in recent months.

They are also arguing that no compromise must be made with Israel, insisting that any deal includes the release of all terrorists from Israeli jails, including 1,236 murderers who have been sentenced to life imprisonment.

They also oppose Israel’s proposal to deport the deportation all the prisoners who will be released by Israel as part of the deal from Gaza and the West Bank. Such a requirement is unable to be accepted by Israel and is believed to be frowned upon by Egypt and Qatar.

The intransigence shown by these smaller groups – which are fortified inside tunnels that extend from the al-Shati camp in the north of the Strip to large areas between Khan Yunis and Rafah – is understood to enrage Sinwar after they followed his orders on October 7. This is further souring relations between them.

Although rarely acknowledged, these internal Palestinian frictions have been a stumbling block in the way of a hostage deal.

Sinwar’s main demands are the end of the war and the withdrawal of the IDF from the entire Gaza Strip. He is also seeking American guarantees that Israel will not continue the war after the hostage deal is completed.

This is in response to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s repeated public announcements that the war will only be concluded once Hamas is destroyed and the hostages have been released.

Another obstacle in the recent talks is the matter of the Philadelphi corridor, a narrow strip of land between Gaza and Egypt through which thread the smuggling tunnels.

In order to restore its depleted military power, Hamas needs the Philadelphi sorridor, through which it can resume the smuggling of weapons, as it did for the 20 years prior to October 7.

Netanyahu opposes this, even though he knows it could torpedo the deal. This is despite Egypt’s promise that it would place surveillance facilities underground and build an iron wall to prevent the smuggling.

The Philadelphi corridor was established on the completion of Israel’s withdrawal from Sinai in 1982, following the peace agreement with Egypt. It is an area of land about nine miles long and half-a-mile wide, running across the southern edge of the Gaza Strip from Israel to the Mediterranean Sea. 

When Hamas strengthened and consolidated itself as a popular resistance movement, and then as a terrorist organisation, and succeeded in taking control of the Gaza Strip in June 2007, it also dominated the entire smuggling industry through the Philadelphi corridor.

The smuggling route stretched from Iran through the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea, crossing the deserts of Sudan and Egypt, through Sinai and from there into Gaza. In a short time, the corridor was the site of a well-oiled weapons smuggling machine. This included large-scale long-range rockets, anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles, and even extended to cash and humans.

These were Iranian experts who infiltrated Gaza to teach the Hamas terrorists how to use the sophisticated means of warfare they had supplied to them, or homegrown militants from Gaza being sent for training abroad.

Israel now controls it and is holding the territory in order to stop weapons and other things coming over – or under – the Egyptian border.

Talks in Qatar have resumed but a breakthrough remains elusive. Israeli sources believe Sinwar may be playing for time, delaying his answers in the hope of a wider regional war that would occupy the IDF and divert it from Gaza up to the burning north of Israel.

At the same time, Hamas is encouraging terrorist activity in the West Bank in order to further burden the Israeli army. According to intelligence sources, Sinwar has tasked Zaher Jabarin – who was sentenced in Israel to life imprisonment but released in 2011 as part of the prisoner exchange for Gilad Shalit – to conduct the activity.

Jabarin is currently operating from Turkey and is considered to be the top financier of Hamas, Israeli sources believe. He is understood to have lately been transferring large amounts of funds received from Iran to fuel terror in the West Bank.

This article was amended to acknowledge that the number of hostages held with Sinwar underground is disputed