Hamas has indicated it is currently unable to identify and track down 40 Israeli hostages needed for the first phase of a ceasefire deal, according to an Israeli official and a source familiar with the discussions, raising fears that more hostages may be dead than are publicly known.
There are supposed to be 136 hostages in Gaza.
At one point both Israel and Hamas seemed to agree that there were approximately
200250 hostages.https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/what-do-we-now-about-hamas-hostages-2023-10-19/
Edit:
Wikipedia cites a slightly higher numberhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Israeli–Palestinian_prisoner_exchange
Edit 2: my mistake, they corroborate their numbers (250)
…
According to who?
The IDF?
Why would anyone be listening to them at this point? They lie constantly about damn near everything…
I mean this is publicly verifiable information in terms of who went missing on Oct. 7th. It would be foolish to lie about it.
And we all know Israel never makes foolish lies.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/09/middleeast/gaza-food-aid-convoy-deaths-eyewitness-intl-investigation-cmd/index.html
https://abcnews.go.com/International/world-central-kitchen-attack-on-aid-workers-gaza/story?id=108814150
https://time.com/6176045/israel-response-shireen-abu-akleh-killing/
I mean IDF has been dishonest certainly but this is something that has been thoroughly examined and vetted by this point. We would know if there were doubts about the number.
These events are also different because they are singular points in time—the lies serve to diffuse criticism until the public attention has faded so that less invested members of the public never learn the truth. So I’m not sure I agree they are foolish unfortunately, though there is of course a long term risk with using this tactic too often.
The hostage count is an ongoing thing. If they continued to stand by numbers that people are commonly discussing and have learned are incorrect, it would be much more embarrassing for them than the above incidents which are mostly forgotten by the general public, excepting perhaps the most recent one which did seem to break through a bit more.
They are probably still there, check hospitals, community centres, school, emergency camps… you will probably find their corpses under all the rubble from Israeli fired American and British missiles.