Families of Israeli hostages held in Gaza accused the Israeli government of giving up on their relatives and prioritizing the destruction of Hamas, marking a new high in the growing tension between the country’s leadership and the families on the issue.
The accusation came after a top Israeli official told families with relatives still captive in Gaza that the government wouldn’t end the war against Hamas in exchange for the release of hostages.
“The Israeli government made a conscious and deliberate decision to sacrifice the hostages,” the Hostages Families Forum, a support and advocacy group, said Friday. “They chose to prioritize the continuation of the fighting over achieving the supreme goal of liberating the hostages.”
Recovering hostages as well as destroying Hamas are two goals Israel has said it seeks to achieve in the war in Gaza. The goals aren’t mutually exclusive given that the military operations serve to put pressure on Hamas to release hostages, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling coalition says.
Tzachi Hanegbi, the head of Israel’s National Security Council, on Thursday told several relatives that Israel would keep fighting and still might be able to get Hamas to free female, elderly and sick hostages in the coming months, according to a participant in the meeting. But Hanegbi warned that Hamas might be unwilling to return all the hostages since Israel was unwilling to stop the war, the person said.
“I have conducted many meetings with families of hostages since the start of the war and I don’t publish their content in public,” Hanegbi said separately.
So far in the war, the Israeli military has rescued three hostages from Gaza, including two Israeli men who were held in Rafah. A major sticking point in monthslong hostage negotiations has been Hamas’s insistence that Israel agree to a permanent end to the fighting.
The absence of progress in the negotiations and Israel’s military operations in Gaza have raised doubt among the hostages’ families about the government’s commitment to freeing captured Israelis.
Anxiety has been building among families about the fading likelihood that their captured relatives could have survived after almost eight months in captivity with little food or access to medical care amid Israeli military operations and airstrikes that have killed more than 36,000 people in the enclave, according to Palestinian authorities. The figure doesn’t specify how many were combatants.
Israel has deepened its military offensive in the southern Gazan city of Rafah where it says Hamas has its last strongholds and militants are holding remaining hostages. Since Israel announced the Rafah operation on May 6, however, it hasn’t recovered any living or dead hostages there.
Some 121 of the approximately 250 hostages taken in the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7 remain unaccounted for. Israel has officially confirmed that 37 hostages taken on Oct. 7 are dead and remain in Gaza based on Israeli intelligence. The military has brought back 19 dead bodies of hostages since the start of the war, including seven in the past few weeks. Israel said the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas killed more than 1,200 people.
Write to Chao Deng at chao.deng@wsj.com