Netanyahu Warns of Renewed Fighting in Gaza if Hostages Are Not Released by Saturday

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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has issued a firm warning that the ceasefire in Gaza will end, and Israel will resume "intense fighting" if Hamas does not release the hostages by midday Saturday. The statement came after a four-hour security cabinet meeting on Wednesday evening.  

 

“If Hamas does not return our hostages by Saturday noon, the ceasefire will end, and the IDF will return to intense fighting until Hamas is finally defeated,” Netanyahu declared in a video message. He also emphasized that the security cabinet supported U.S. President Donald Trump’s demand for the immediate release of hostages by the deadline. 

 

The warning follows Hamas’s announcement that it would delay the scheduled hostage release, claiming Israeli violations of the truce. While Trump has explicitly called for all captives to be freed, Netanyahu's statement did not specify whether Israel would only resume fighting if all 76 remaining hostages were not released. However, an Israeli official stated that Jerusalem would not move forward with any ceasefire agreements unless Hamas released “all nine hostages… in the coming days.” Currently, 17 hostages remain set for release in the first phase of the ceasefire, with nine of them believed to be alive.  

 

“If there is no progress that gets the deal back on track, decisions must be made,” the official said. “Hamas is being faced with the massive scale of destruction [in Gaza], is counting the dead, and publishing the list of its dead commanders.”  

 

The hostage crisis has revealed harrowing details of the captives’ treatment. The mother of hostage Eliya Cohen stated on Sunday that her son had been held in a tunnel, chained for the entire duration of his captivity, and left with an untreated bullet wound. “He gets little food or daylight,” she revealed.  

 

One of the three civilian men released on Saturday—Ben Ami, Sharabi, and Levy—described the brutal conditions in which they were kept. “They treated us like animals,” he told Kan, Israel’s public broadcaster. Reports suggest that the three were interrogated separately and tortured. During these sessions, they sustained burns from a white-hot, unidentified object. At one point, one of the hostages collapsed, leading the others to fear he had died.  

 

“I was bound in a dark tunnel, without air, without light. I couldn’t stand or walk, and only toward the time of the release did the terrorists remove the chains and I learned to walk again,” one former hostage recounted. The captives were reportedly kept mostly in tunnels, always in dark, unventilated spaces, and had to plead with their captors to allow them to relieve themselves more than once a day.  

With the deadline fast approaching, tensions remain high as Israel prepares for the possibility of renewed conflict.

 

 

Based on a report by BBC | TOI 2025-02-12

 

 

 

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