Jerusalem —
The strike plan called for hitting a vast underground complex in Gaza’s southern city of Rafah, comprised of dozens of rooms and a network of interconnecting tunnels. Instead of a dozen bombs, the Israeli military had decided to drop just two munitions, each aimed at a single room. The objective: killing Muhammad Shabaneh, the commander of Hamas’ Rafah Brigade.
On May 24, 2024, the bombs hit their marks. But instead of Shabaneh, two Israeli hostages were killed.
Two senior Israeli sources said the military had assessed there were no hostages in that part of the complex. Months later, when Israeli ground troops reached the site, they found the bodies of Youssef and Hamza Ziyadne, an Israeli Bedouin father and son who had been kidnapped by Hamas on October 7, 2023.
During the deadliest day in the history of the state of Israel, a total of 251 hostages were abducted and taken into Gaza by Hamas-led militants. More than 1,200 people – mostly civilians – were killed in the terror attack. It took two years of war and three ceasefire agreements to return the hostages.
Three years later, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insists that he defied the odds and brought all the hostages back home.
“We brought back every last one of them,” Netanyahu boasted at the UN General Assembly last month. Facing elections in three weeks, Netanyahu has repeated that statement on multiple occasions, rarely if ever mentioning that not all of the hostages returned home alive.
“The fate of every person touches the fibers of our soul, and therefore we invested unceasing effort until we brought back all our hostages, down to the last of them,” he said on Monday, during the official October 7 memorial ceremonies.
The Ziyadnes are among 40 hostages taken into Gaza alive who were killed or died in captivity, roughly one in five of the 206 abducted alive. Hamas held them in tunnels and hideaways where, according to released hostages, they were abused, starved, chained and beaten.
Many were killed by their captors. Others succumbed to their wounds or the conditions endured in captivity. Some died in Israeli strikes and operations, or in the shadow of Israeli decisions. For a few, the full circumstances may never be known.
This account of how those 40 hostages were killed or died in captivity – and why some were not released before their deaths – is based on conversations with dozens of hostage families, as well as Israeli military and government officials who helped piece together their stories.
Nearly half were killed by their captors, according to Israeli military officials and forensic evidence reviewed by their families. Among them were 4-year-old Ariel Bibas and his brother, nine-month-old Kfir, who the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said were killed by their captors’ “bare hands,” while 68-year-old Itzhak Elgarat was tortured to death, according to a former hostage and autopsy results. Hamas did not respond to CNN’s request for comment; Palestinian Islamic Jihad said it “does not kill captives.”
At least 11 were killed directly by Israeli military fire or in Israeli ground operations: three young men who managed to escape and were shot by troops who mistook them for Palestinian militants, a shooting the IDF Chief of the General Staff concluded should not have been carried out; a 25-year-old named Sahar Baruch who was killed in a failed rescue operation; several hostages who were killed by Israeli bombs.
Some of the killings can be linked to nearby Israeli military activity. When the ground offensive began on October 27, 2023, Israeli military officials said Hamas issued a standing order: If Israeli forces approach, move the hostages, and if it’s impossible – kill them.
The hostages in Gaza were very aware of the dangers associated with the Israeli military’s presence. Eli Sharabi, who published his firsthand account of captivity in his book “Hostage,” wrote, “That’s what we fear: that IDF commandos will try to enter the tunnel to rescue us by force. Because we know it would never work, and it’d be the end. The end of us. And the end of them.”
A CNN review of the circumstances of the 40 hostages’ deaths found that at least 24 – more than half – can be traced back to Israeli military actions, including Israeli strikes and ground maneuvers that led to captors killing their hostages.
In every case of a hostage killed by or in proximity to Israeli fire, the military says it had no prior knowledge they were there.
The IDF declined to discuss specific cases, citing the privacy of hostage families, but said “all possible measures were taken to avoid putting (the hostages) at risk,” and noted the challenges posed by “a dense and complex civilian environment.”
“To the extent that any harm occurred during the complex fighting, it was unintentional and occurred under operational constraints on the ground,” the IDF said in a statement. “The hostages were abducted and held captive by the Hamas terrorist organization, which bore sole responsibility for the conditions of their captivity.”
(The Hostages and Missing Families Forum counts 46 living hostages who died in Gaza, but CNN’s investigation found six of those hostages were killed as part of the October 7 attack.)
The October 7 hostages who never made it home alive
A few hours after the October 7 attack began, Netanyahu declared unequivocally, “We are at war.” That evening, his cabinet set its main goal – destroying the military and governing capabilities of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. The ensuing three years of war killed more than 74,000 Palestinians in Gaza, according to the health ministry there.
Bringing back the hostages was not part of the original war aims, two Israeli officials said. About a week later, as the scope of abductions became clear, the cabinet added another goal: creating the conditions for their return.
The military faced an unprecedented challenge: dense urban combat, some 250 hostages scattered above and below ground and two objectives that appeared to pull in opposite directions. Destroying Hamas would require targeting its leadership. But Hamas, Israeli officials said, kept many hostages close to their senior commanders, using them as “human shields” and making every strike a gamble.
The working theory, the officials told CNN, was that most hostages would come home through deals, not rescues, and that military pressure was the only way to bring Hamas to the table. (A total of eight hostages would be rescued in IDF operations.) One senior official called it “synergy.”
“The ground maneuver will pressure Hamas to release the hostages, and the more hostages we bring home, the easier it will be to maneuver afterwards,” the official reasoned.
But that approach also carried inherent risk for the hostages, some of whom would later be killed by Israeli strikes or gunfire.
“We never had 100% intelligence coverage about everyone,” a senior military official said. Hamas constantly moved the captives, so “the picture kept shifting.”
Within days of October 7, the military had formed a special hostage task force, led by Maj. Gen. Nitzan Alon. Hundreds of soldiers were assigned to a 24/7 mechanism, linking the air force, intelligence and the IDF’s Southern Command to protect the hostages from Israel’s own offensive. Its main tool was a system of restricted zones around suspected hostage locations, known as “polygons,” drawn broadly at first. These polygons narrowed as intelligence improved; they expanded again after fatal mishaps.
Strikes on significant targets, including Hamas military chief Mohammed Deif, and hostage rescue operations, were regularly delayed or called off over concerns for hostage safety, three officials said.
Still, as a senior official acknowledged, “It was not without risks and there are places where we failed.”
In Khan Younis, the IDF thought it knew where the hostages were. Then, it didn’t.
In the first weeks of the war, about 20 hostages were believed to have been held in a huge underground compound, known to the IDF as “the kingdom.” Sources said a polygon had been established there to ensure no Israeli strikes or ground operations endangered the hostages.
But after the first ceasefire collapsed in December 2023, the Israeli military launched a major ground offensive in Khan Younis, and the military soon lost track of the hostages.
The army believed they had been taken south. It did not know some had been moved to Khan Younis’ northern Hamad City neighborhood.
On February 14, 2024, the air force struck a tunnel in that neighborhood, targeting two senior Hamas commanders, unaware of six hostages inside. Only in May did the army grasp what had happened, a military official said.
When the bodies were recovered in August, an autopsy found gunshot wounds in all six bodies but could not establish the cause of death. Their captors had also been found dead in the same tunnel, without wounds. Officials believe they were suffocated by the toxins released by the bombs; they cannot rule out the possibility that the hostages were killed by the gases and shot afterwards.
Yuval Dancyg, whose father, Alex, was among the dead, says he still doesn’t understand how the army lost track of the hostages in the first place. He said he warned officers in real time that the Khan Younis offensive would kill his father.
“They told me not to worry, that they know where he is and they have enough information,” he told CNN. He said the IDF Chief of Staff, Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, later acknowledged in a private meeting that the army lacked sufficient information before approving the strike and took responsibility for the fatal error.
The army should have been more careful, Dancyg says, but he places most of the blame elsewhere.
“The ones that are responsible for what happened to them, first of all, is Hamas,” he said.
“But my government could and should have let the hostages out way before. When you have a war with citizens underground and you decide that the war is the most important thing… hostages will get killed.”
Several senior Israeli officials who were involved in the decision- making have said publicly that more hostages would have come home alive if not for politics.
Alon, the general who led the hostage task force, said last week the war “was too long” and could have ended at least a year earlier. Speaking at the Washington Institute, he said Israel could have made the same strategic achievements, and “maybe get some hostages that got killed or murdered during captivity back home alive.”
Current and former Israeli officials said Netanyahu frequently stalled progress on the negotiating track and limited his negotiators’ mandate, barring them from discussing an end-of-war deal until the summer of 2025.
Dror Shalom, a former senior defense ministry official, said in an interview with Yedioth Ahronoth, “We could have returned dozens of hostages, but because of delays in the process and the rejection of the deals, they simply did not return to us.”
The most critical delay, military officials said, came in the spring and summer of 2024.
In late May, Netanyahu and his limited security cabinet approved a three-phase proposal that would begin with a six-week ceasefire and the release of 33 elderly and wounded hostages before leading to the release of all others and an end of the war.
Then-US President Joe Biden announced the proposal days later, and the United Nations Security Council endorsed it.
Hamas took its time answering, two Israeli officials said, but by early July it had signaled it would agree to the May framework, with minor reservations.
That’s when Netanyahu decided to harden Israel’s position, military officials said, inserting new demands such as continued Israeli control of the Philadelphi corridor along the Gaza-Egypt border. His security chiefs disagreed, warning the delay could endanger the hostages. The demand had operational and strategic logic, the officials said, but it disrupted what they say was “almost a done deal.”
Netanyahu stuck to his new demands. His far-right political allies, Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, were threatening to withdraw their support and topple the government if Netanyahu moved forward with the deal and ended the war.
The Prime Minister’s Office has not responded after CNN reached out multiple times.
“There could have been a deal in July,” said Oren Setter, a retired IDF brigadier general who served as deputy director for strategy and negotiations at the Hostages Taskforce. “Hamas was under a lot of pressure and was willing to negotiate with flexibility,” he told CNN. “The fact that we stayed on that Philadelphi issue for so long lost us the opportunity.”
“We knew that the price could be the life of the hostages,” he added.
A few weeks later, that price had names.
By August 2024, Israeli troops had spent months advancing through Rafah and were concentrating on the tunnels under the Tel Al-Sultan neighborhood, where Hamas commanders were believed to be hiding. There was no concrete intelligence of hostages in the area, two officials said, and the IDF’s subsequent investigation put the likelihood of hostages being there as “medium to low.”
On August 27, troops found a Bedouin Israeli hostage, Farhan Al-Qadi, alone in a tunnel. He reported recently hearing a woman speaking Hebrew nearby, saying “good morning.”
After a 24-hour pause in operations, Israeli troops pressed on in the tunnel system.
On August 31, soldiers found six bodies in a tunnel just a few hundred meters away. They had been shot, likely two days earlier, the IDF said.
The army’s official investigation concluded they were murdered by their captors, and that the Israeli maneuver, “although gradual and cautious, had a circumstantial influence” on their execution. Officials say five of the six were slated for release under the May framework, had it been agreed to.
One was Hersh Goldberg-Polin, a 23-year-old Israeli-American citizen kidnapped from the Nova music festival. His mother, Rachel, declines to assign blame. “Pointing fingers does not bring Hersh back, and does not ease my pain,” she said. The bodies of the six, she told CNN, came back skeletal and filthy. They had been starved and tortured.
Widely known as the “Beautiful Six,” they were the last hostages to die in captivity. Israeli officials say that by then, the working methods and intelligence coverage had dramatically improved. But the war went on for more than a year.
The deadlock broke briefly after US President Donald Trump’s reelection: in January 2025, a three-phase ceasefire took effect. Its terms were nearly identical to the deal that was on the verge of being approved the previous summer.
Over the ceasefire’s first six weeks, 30 living hostages and eight deceased were released. Then the truce collapsed and Israel went back to war.
The last 20 living hostages walked free on October 13, 2025 under Trump’s 20-point peace plan. On January 26, 2026, Israel recovered the remains of the last deceased Israeli hostage, Ran Gvili, and the count was complete.
But when political leaders say they brought all the hostages home, Rachel Goldberg-Polin asks them to stop. “Please don’t say that you brought him home… Hersh is buried in the ground five miles from my home, but Hersh never came back to my home.”
