Following complex military operations to recover the bodies of deceased hostages in Gaza, the IDF says there is a possibility that a number of those taken by Hamas on October 7 will never be found, the Times of Israel reported on Tuesday.

During a raid last week the IDF recovered the bodies of five hostages buried behind a wall inside a tunnel some 20m below ground in southern Gaza’s Khan Younis, a discovery made using information provided by a detained terrorist, according to the military.

Israeli military chief Herzi Halevi said after the operation that “we were near these bodies before, we didn’t know how to reach out. Now we knew how to reach out.

“We brought five [slain hostages], that otherwise it’s not certain we would have ever found them.”

In April the IDF recovered the body of hostage Elad Katzir, who had reportedly been killed by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad group in Gaza, and his body buried in the Khan Younis refugee camp where terrorists operated.

Using visual intelligence on the site where Katzir was held, the IDF sent forces to find his body.

According to the military’s assessments, Katzir’s captors were likely the only ones who knew where he was being held, and all had been killed by the IDF.

The military’s latest analysis of the circumstances indicates that as time passes, the likelihood of obtaining vital intelligence on the whereabouts of the hostages increases, but the odds that they will be found alive decreases. The key to discovering the remaining hostages appears to lie in dismantling the network of tunnels under Gaza, which requires ground-force invasions of the region.

The IDF believes Hamas operatives use the tunnels as means of transport, places of shelter, and to launch attacks on troops. 

While the military said it has got better at locating Hamas’s tunnels after finding and demolishing many of the major passages, it is unlikely that they will succeed in finding every last one.

Israeli military spokesperson Daniel Hagari said in a post on X on Tuesday that the IDF’s 98th Division has achieved the “destruction of over 100 kilometres” of terrorist tunnels as of Tuesday.

According to the Times of Israel, the military finds new tunnels by interrogating captured terrorists and searching areas from where rockets were launched or where gunmen attacked Israeli troops. Nearly 300 days after October 7, 111 of the 251 hostages remain in Gaza, including the bodies of 39 confirmed dead by the IDF, and the pressure has been mounting as hostages’ family members push for the return of their loved ones before time runs out.