IDF shutters Hostages HQ: ‘Scenario in which everyone returned is beyond all imagination’

After over two years, and with the return of all the captives from the Gaza Strip, the IDF says its Hostages and Missing Persons Headquarters is going dormant.

The unit had been established under the Military Intelligence Directorate in the wake of the October 7, 2023, Hamas terror onslaught, and was tasked with the intelligence-gathering efforts on the hostages and missing persons. Until November 2025, it was headed by Maj. Gen. (res.) Nitzan Alon, who also served as the IDF’s point man on hostage negotiations.

“The scenario in which everyone returned is beyond all imagination; we did not assess that we would reach this situation,” a senior officer in the unit says in a call with reporters.

In all, the headquarters dealt with 255 hostages held in the Strip — the 251 abducted on October 7 and four who had been held since 2014 and 2015.

During the first days of the war, the unit was looking into 3,100 missing people, a number that dropped over time. It took until the end of 2024 to confirm that a total of 251 had been abducted, according to the officer.

According to the IDF’s data, 38 of the hostages were abducted alive and killed in captivity after October 8, 2023. In many cases, they were murdered by their captors, and in others, the military has confirmed that its own actions, including airstrikes, led to the deaths of hostages.

“Each such case was thoroughly investigated; there were different types of errors, and therefore there were several cases of harm to hostages,” the senior officer says.

The unit was made up of some 2,100 soldiers, around 60 percent of them reservists. The soldiers largely came from the Intelligence Directorate’s Special Operations Division, with others from dozens of units.

According to the senior officer, work at the headquarters was divided into two departments: one dealing with the living hostages and another with the deceased.

Teams of intelligence officers investigated where the hostages were held and by whom, and what their conditions were. The officer says the work was constant, as Hamas often moved hostages around, especially in Gaza City.

The officer says that throughout the entire war, up until the October 2025 ceasefire, the military prepared for rescue operations of living hostages. But he says it became “increasingly operationally complex” to carry them out.

“There were operations that were not publicized, that were already prepared and were halted at the last moment, or operations that went into action and did not achieve their objective because the hostage was not found at the location, but we continued to work on this all the time,” he adds.