Hamas says Israel rejected offer for 7 more women and children, bodies of 3 Israelis

Jacob Magid is The Times of Israel's US bureau chief

Hamas announces that Israel rejected its offer to release seven women and children along with the bodies of three other Israelis for an extension of the truce that started Friday and held for six days by Wednesday.

Israel said it would be willing to extend the truce for an additional day for every 10 abducted Israeli women and children that Hamas releases.

The truce is set to end at 7 a.m.

Hamas says in its statement that the list of seven Israelis it presented earlier this evening were the only Israeli women and children that it was able to locate in Gaza. Other allied terror groups also abducted Israelis on October 7, but several of those hostages were still released over the past week.

An Israeli official told reporters on Wednesday that Jerusalem believes at least 15 more women and children remain in Gaza.

Israel has in the past rejected Hamas claims that it could not locate all of the hostages in Gaza, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad falsely claimed that one of its hostages was killed in Israeli airstrikes when she was in fact alive and released in recent days

Meanwhile, Hamas’s military wing issues a statement saying that it ordered its forces to be on high alert in anticipation of a renewal in the terror group’s fighting with Israel.

The statement came two hours before the deadline set by Israeli officials who warned that they would resume fighting if Hamas did not deliver by 7 a.m. an updated list of the hostages it is prepared to release in order to extend the truce by at least one more day.

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