Netanyahu reportedly warned about hostages’ fate at meeting

The amount of information Israel is able to gather on hostages in Gaza is dissipating, defense officials reportedly told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, during a meeting on the crisis.

“The more time that passes, there’s less and less intelligence on the hostages, and that’s very worrying,” a defense official is quoted by the Ynet news site as saying in the meeting.

According to the report, defense officials told Netanyahu and others at the meeting that Hamas has ordered those guarding hostages to execute them if they feel the army is getting close.

The site reports that the meeting is the first high-level engagement on the issue in a month. It quotes a source with knowledge of the issue saying that “there’s an impression that nobody is dealing with this, not the mediators and everyone has given up. There’s a feeling that it’s fallen off the agenda given the fears of regional war.”

Earlier in the evening, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant met with families of hostages and was told that they feared a renewed Israeli offensive in northern Gaza was endangering their loved ones, a spokesperson for the Hostages and Missing Families Forum says in a statement.