# The hostages of October 7: what Hamas did with 251 people Hamas terrorists dragged 251 people into Gaza on 7 October 2023: babies, grandparents, farmworkers. Here is what the record and the survivors show. ## Key takeaways - Israeli authorities counted 251 people abducted on 7 October 2023; CNN reported 206 were taken alive and 40 of those later died in captivity. - In the November 2023 truce, Hamas and its allies freed 105 hostages and Israel released 240 Arab prisoners, according to the Anti-Defamation League and Jewish Virtual Library. - The last 20 living hostages were released on 13 October 2025; U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff said in January 2026 that all 28 deceased hostages had also been returned. - Returned captives described starvation, chains and airless tunnels; the IDF said a Khan Younis tunnel that had held about 20 people had no daylight and little oxygen. ## How many were taken Think about the first hours. Hamas and allied terrorist groups had crossed from Gaza into southern Israel on 7 October 2023, and no one knew who was missing. Families called hospitals and army hotlines. Names moved on and off lists as bodies were identified and as people presumed kidnapped were found dead in their homes. Early official figures clustered around 200 to 240. Jewish Virtual Library records that the first public estimate of more than 100 was later revised to 242 and then to 251. That last number is the one Israeli authorities published, and the one major outlets now use, for the people taken into Gaza that day. CNN, in an investigation published on the third anniversary, put the civilian death toll of the attack at more than 1,200 and reported that it took two years of war and three ceasefire agreements to bring the hostages home, living or dead. The 251 include people who were already dead when their bodies were carried into Gaza, and people taken alive. CNN, citing Israeli officials and hostage families, reported that 206 of the 251 were abducted alive and that 40 of those later died in captivity: roughly one in five. Israeli military officials and forensic work shared with families, the same investigation said, attributed nearly half of those deaths to the captors. Other deaths were attributed to wounds, to the conditions of captivity, or to Israeli fire and operations. For a few, the circumstances may never be fully known. Hamas did not answer CNN’s request for comment; Palestinian Islamic Jihad told the network it “does not kill captives.” The forensic and intelligence findings are Israel’s, and no one has been able to examine them independently inside Gaza. The captors, who chose to hold civilians in tunnels in the first place, have offered no evidence at all. ## Who they were Hamas did not take soldiers only. It took whoever it found. Infants, children, grandparents, Thai farmworkers, dual nationals, Negev Bedouin citizens of Israel, off-duty soldiers, and young people who had gone to a dance party. At the Nova music festival near Kibbutz Re’im, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies reported, Hamas and other terrorists killed more than 360 people. Festival-goers who reached roadside bomb shelters were not safe there either. Eliya Cohen, later held for 505 days, told CNN he hid with his girlfriend, Ziv Abud, under bodies after grenades were thrown into a packed shelter. He was loaded onto a pickup with Hersh Goldberg-Polin and Or Levy and driven into Gaza. In the kibbutzim on the Gaza border, the terrorists went house to house. Hostages were taken from Be’eri, Kfar Aza, Nir Oz, Nirim, Holit, Nir Yitzhak, Magen and other communities. From Nir Oz, Hamas and its allies took Shiri Bibas, 32, her sons Ariel, 4, and Kfir, nine months old, and her husband, Yarden. They also took Oded Lifshitz, 84, a journalist and kibbutz founder, and his wife, Yocheved, 85. From Be’eri they took Eli Sharabi, whose wife and daughters were murdered in the attack. From Kfar Aza they took Emily Damari and Doron Steinbrecher. Some of those names became known worldwide. Many others did not. They were not only Israelis. In late October 2023, FDD reported, citing Israeli officials, that more than half of the then-estimated 230 hostages held foreign citizenship, including 54 Thai nationals, 15 Argentines, 12 Americans and others, some of them dual citizens. The Thai workers had been employed in agriculture in the border region. Four people were released through Qatari mediation before any ceasefire: Americans Judith Raanan, 59, and Natalie Raanan, 17, on 20 October, and Yocheved Lifshitz and Nurit Cooper on 23 October, according to the Anti-Defamation League’s war timeline. Their husbands stayed behind. ## What the survivors described The people who came out told their stories to Israeli media, to hospitals and later to foreign reporters. The details of each cell differ. The conditions do not. Many were held underground. In January 2024 the Israel Defense Forces announced that it had uncovered an 830-yard tunnel in Khan Younis, about 20 meters down, with five narrow cells, iron doors, mattresses and small toilets. Investigators said DNA and other evidence indicated about 20 hostages had been held there, including six-year-old Emilia Aloni, whose drawings were found inside; she and her mother were freed in the November 2023 deal. IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari said the hostages had endured “harsh conditions without daylight, in dense air with little oxygen, and terrible humidity that makes breathing difficult.” A six-year-old, twenty meters underground. That is what Hamas built its tunnels for. Yocheved Lifshitz, speaking after her release, described the abduction as “hellfire, a situation that we did not think or know we could find ourselves in,” according to FDD’s contemporaneous account of her remarks. She was 85. Younger men held much longer described slow starvation. Eliya Cohen told CNN he spent most of captivity in a small, dark tunnel with Or Levy, Eli Sharabi and Alon Ohel, their legs bound with motorcycle chains, sharing scraps of pita and canned beans. Jewish Virtual Library’s compilation of published testimonies records the same from others: Ofer Kalderon, held 484 days after being taken from Nir Oz with two of his children, described dirty mattresses, weeks in narrow tunnels, and being beaten on the way into Gaza. Returned hostages, that compilation states, had lost up to 55 pounds. Some women described sexual harassment or assault by guards. Ori Megidish, an Israeli soldier rescued by the IDF on 30 October 2023, later said a captor touched her under the pretext of checking a wound. Rom Braslavski, held by Palestinian Islamic Jihad, told Israel’s Channel 13 after his 2025 release that he had been stripped, bound, starved and sexually assaulted. These are individual testimonies, not a census of every captive’s experience. But the pattern does not rest on a single voice: hunger, darkness, movement between houses and tunnels, and captives used as leverage. ## The November 2023 deal The first large exchange was not a peace agreement. It was a ransom. After weeks of Qatari, Egyptian and U.S. mediation, Israel and Hamas announced in late November 2023 a pause in fighting so that women, children and teenagers could be traded for Arab prisoners held by Israel. The Anti-Defamation League’s war timeline records that 105 hostages, mostly women and children, were released in several stages in exchange for approximately 240 Arab prisoners, most of them imprisoned for violent crimes. Jewish Virtual Library’s compilation of prisoner exchanges records the same 105, broken into 81 Israelis, 23 Thais and one Filipino, and the same 240 prisoners. An FDD account later described the November releases as 81 Israelis and 24 non-Israelis, many of them kidnapped foreign workers. The pause began on 24 November and was extended. It collapsed at the end of the month when Hamas, FDD reported, refused to provide a list of the remaining women and children and resumed firing rockets. The deal brought home children and many of the women. It did not bring home most of the men, or the soldiers, or the dead. Combat resumed. Over the following year Israeli forces rescued a handful of living hostages in raids, among them Fernando Marman and Louis Har from Nir Yitzhak in February 2024, and four Nova captives, Noa Argamani, Almog Meir Jan, Andrey Kozlov and Shlomi Ziv, from Nuseirat in June. They also recovered bodies from tunnels. Each operation is documented by the IDF and by FDD’s running coverage. They were exceptions. Most of the remaining captives stayed in Gaza. ## The 2025 agreements and the dead A second deal, brokered with U.S., Qatari and Egyptian involvement, took effect in January 2025. The American Jewish Committee, summarizing the published terms, said Hamas was to free 33 hostages in a first six-week phase: women and children, men aged 50 and above, and injured civilians, including two Americans. The first three living women, Romi Gonen, taken from Nova, and Emily Damari and Doron Steinbrecher, taken from Kfar Aza, came out on 19 January. Each following Saturday brought more living captives and, as the phase required, the dead. Watch how Hamas handled the dead. On 20 February 2025 it handed over four coffins it said contained Shiri Bibas, Ariel, Kfir and Oded Lifshitz, after a staged display in Khan Younis that FDD described as a Hamas-choreographed ceremony with black coffins paraded onto a stage. Israeli forensic examiners identified Ariel, Kfir and Lifshitz. The fourth body was not Shiri Bibas. It was later identified as an Arab woman from Gaza. Hamas then transferred remains that Israel did identify as Shiri. IDF spokesman Hagari said forensic findings and intelligence showed the two boys “were not killed in an airstrike” but “murdered in cold blood” and that “the terrorists did not shoot the two young boys — they killed them with their bare hands,” contradicting Hamas’s earlier claim. Those findings were Israel’s; they were shared, Hagari said, with foreign partners. A preschooler and a baby, and a terrorist organization that turned their coffins into a show. Fighting resumed after the first phase. A third agreement, part of a U.S.-brokered ceasefire in October 2025, required Hamas to return everyone still held, living and dead. CNN reported that the last 20 living hostages were released on 13 October 2025. The American Jewish Committee recorded that Israel released 2,058 Arab prisoners in exchange. The dead came more slowly. Jewish Virtual Library reported that Hamas missed the initial deadline, transferring only a few coffins at a time; at least once, forensic testing found that a body handed over was not a hostage. On 27 January 2026, Fox News reported, U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff said “ALL 20 living hostages and all 28 deceased hostages in Gaza have now been returned,” after Israeli police officer Ran Gvili’s remains were identified. The Hostages and Missing Families Forum thanked the U.S. administration. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu later said, “We brought back every last one of them.” CNN noted that he rarely added that not all of them came back alive. ## The families who would not let go The Hostages and Missing Families Forum was formed in the aftermath of the 7 October attack. Relatives with no military rank and no diplomatic channel built one: a tent and then a plaza in Tel Aviv that became Hostage Square, weekly rallies, and posters with the faces of children and grandparents. The American Jewish Committee has said it worked with more than 50 of those families. Their shared demand: the captives must never become an abstraction. By the time the last living hostages walked out, some of those posters were already photographs of the dead. The Bibas children had been a baby and a preschooler. Hersh Goldberg-Polin, 23, taken from Nova, was murdered in a tunnel in 2024 with five others whose bodies Israeli forces later recovered. Thai workers who had come to pick fruit died far from home. ## Who took them One distinction remains. On one side, a democratic state whose citizens argued bitterly about the price, and still treated bringing civilians home as a public obligation. On the other, terrorist groups that took babies, farmworkers and festival-goers as bargaining chips, held them in tunnels, and put their coffins on a stage. Civilians in Gaza paid a terrible price in the war that followed 7 October. That does not change who took the hostages, or what the people who survived captivity say it was like. Anyone who talks about this war and leaves the hostages out is hiding the reason it started. See the officers’ own account of the war in [Naza: The Real Story](https://nazadocumentary.com/film). Then read [how the IDF finds hostages in Gaza](https://nazadocumentary.com/blog/how-the-idf-finds-hostages) and [hostage medicine in Gaza: what the film presents](https://nazadocumentary.com/blog/hostage-medicine-never-arrived).