Yahya Sinwar leader of the Palestinian Hamas Islamist movement speaks during a meeting with members of the the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of the Palestinian Hamas movement, in Gaza City, on April 30, 2022(photo credit: ATTIA MUHAMMED/FLASH90)
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For months, all top IDF and defense officials said that most or all of the hostages and Hamas high command had fled to southern Gaza.
Despite months of saying that all of the Hamas leaders are in Khan Yunis in southern Gaza, some may be in central Gaza, the Jerusalem Post has learned.
Generally before October 7, Hamas’s “civilian” functions leadership, such as Yahya Sinwar’s apparatus for governing the Gaza Strip, was in Gaza City in northern Gaza.
There was also a military quarter in Gaza City where Hamas military chief Muhammad Deif spent time.
However, either in preparation for the October 7 invasion, around the time of the IDF invasion of October 25-27, or at the latest, once they saw that the IDF was invading for real and routing Hamas forces, the Hamas leadership fled in a southern direction from Gaza City.
For months, all top IDF and defense officials said that most or all of the hostages and Hamas high command had fled to southern Gaza, most likely to Khan Yunis.
Incorrect predictions of Hamas leaders hiding places
There were already holes in some of these predictions when it turned out during the ceasefire week that Hamas was holding hostages in Shejaia.
Between December 10-18, the IDF learned that a second set of hostages had also been held in Shejaia, which the IDF mistakenly killed, thinking they were terrorists.
In a partial explanation of the mistaken killing incident, top IDF officials said they had not fully trained Shejaia regular soldiers for the possibility of running into hostages. This second incident was the strongest testament to how convinced the IDF was at some point that all the hostages and Hamas leadership were in southern Gaza.
In addition, in early December, the IDF for the first time started to invade portions of central Gaza. However, a more aggressive invasion of central Gaza did not start until weeks later.
The Post can now reveal that portions of Hamas’s top leadership may be in central Gaza with hostages, and not only in southern Gaza in Khan Yunis, which was “the party line” for the defense establishment for a couple of months.
Given that central Gaza was one of the last pieces of the Strip on the IDF’s radar screen, there are now questions about whether the IDF missed the idea that some top Hamas leaders and some hostages might be in central Gaza or whether it was known, but kept under wraps, to focus on northern Gaza and then Khan Yunis.
The theory that the IDF missed central Gaza’s importance would raise questions about whether its other estimates about the Hamas leadership locations are correct.
The theory that the IDF knew, but kept the focus on southern Gaza could have been an attempt to catch any Hamas top leaders with hostages in central Gaza by surprise.
In fact, there was a period of days when IDF sources had told the Post and other media that there were hostages in central Gaza where the Israeli censor temporarily blocked publication.
