Gaza war hostage crisis
hostages taken into Gaza
In the wake of the October 7 attacks that sparked the Gaza war, Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups abducted 251 people from Israel to the Gaza Strip, including children, women, and elderly people. Almost half of the hostages were foreign nationals or had multiple citizenships, and some hostages were Negev Bedouins. The hostages were held in different locations in the Gaza Strip.
168 hostages were returned alive to Israel, with 105 released in the 2023 Gaza war ceasefire, five released by Hamas outside the framework of any ceasefire agreement, eight rescued by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), 30 released during the January 2025 Gaza war ceasefire. The 20 remaining living hostages were released as part of the Gaza peace plan on 13 October 2025.
The bodies of 85 hostages were repatriated to Israel, who were killed on 7 October 2023 or in Hamas captivity. Three had escaped captivity, and were killed in a friendly fire incident by IDF troops. An additional 48 hostages were recovered in military operations, 8 were returned in the January 2025 ceasefire deal, and 27 during the Gaza peace plan. The body of the last hostage, Ran Gvili, was recovered by Israeli forces from a cemetery in northern Gaza on 26 January 2026.
The return of the hostages was a goal of the Israeli operation in Gaza.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Gaza war hostage crisis” is hostages taken into Gaza. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Gaza, hostage and crisis, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q123005094. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2023, 2025 and 2026.
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This entry incorporates text from “Gaza war hostage crisis” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.