What happened
Hostages released in the November 2023 exchange and subsequent deals described being held in civilian homes and in Hamas's tunnel network, often moved repeatedly between locations, held with minimal food, and in several documented cases subjected to physical and sexual abuse by their captors — accounts corroborated across multiple released hostages independently rather than resting on a single testimony. The UN Commission of Inquiry's finding that sexual violence 'may be ongoing against those still held in captivity' was based on patterns described by hostages released in staged deals through 2024, meaning the assessment necessarily could not extend to hostages who had not yet been released, or who died in captivity.
Of the roughly 251 people taken hostage, dozens died in captivity — some from the conditions of captivity itself, and Israel has also stated that a number of hostages were killed by Israeli strikes on the locations where they were being held, an outcome that reflects the risk created by keeping hostages inside a densely-populated urban war zone rather than a discrete finding attributable to Hamas alone. By the terms of the October 2025 ceasefire, the remaining living hostages were released and the bodies of those who died were returned in a phased process, some considerably delayed and used by Hamas as continued leverage in negotiations — itself documented by hostage families and mediators as a further, deliberate prolonging of their families' distress beyond the initial abduction.
This entry and the one preceding it are the most severe in Palestine's file, and they are treated with the same evidentiary rigor the project applies to the Israeli conduct documented in the companion file: specific, corroborated findings from UN investigative bodies are reported as such, and the limits of what could and could not be independently verified are stated rather than elided in either direction.