According to Seymour Hersh, a large group of Hamas’s hostages were taken to the Al-Shifa Hospital. From Hersh at seymourhersh.substack.com:
Secret talks between Hamas, Israel, and the US continue as the war in Gaza drags on
A view from the southern Israeli city of Sderot of the sun setting over the Gaza Strip on November 17. / Photo by Kenzo Tribouillard/AFP via Getty Images.
In 1991 I published a book, The Samson Option, about Israel’s then little-known and still officially unacknowledged nuclear arsenal. Israel did have the bomb, lots of bombs, but the real secret the book revealed was the extent to which three American presidents—Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson—had helped the Israelis produce, deploy, and lie about them.
No one likes to be the bearer of bad news, but I remain mystified by the ongoing inability of the Biden administration and the Israeli government headed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to tell the truth about what may or may not be grim news.
Earlier this week, I wrote that there were secret talks going on between Israel and Hamas about the release of hostages. I also wrote that the Israeli military and intelligence community believed there was a network of tunnels and a command-and-control bunker where Hamas had been hiding its hostages under the campus of several buildings at the Al-Shifa Hospital.
A knowledgeable American official has since told me that the Israeli intelligence community suspected from the outset of the war that the Hamas tunnel system, as widespread as it was throughout Gaza City, was not going to be the final destination of the hostages. “The tunnels are five-and-a-half feet high and three-and-a-half feet wide, just wide enough for someone with combat gear to get through,” the official said. The big fear was that Hamas may have killed all of the soldiers right away. “Moms and children are valuable. Soldiers are not.” The official added that Israel intelligence “does not know where all the hostages are.” But they do know where some of them were.
