Hamas has released a video announcing the death of two Israeli hostages and claimed that they were killed by Israeli airstrikes.
The video showed a female hostage named in Israeli media as Noa Argamani, 26, speaking under duress, revealing that two men she was held captive with had been killed in captivity. It was not clear when or where the video was filmed and there was no independent confirmation of Hamas’s claims.
The three hostages were shown in a 37-second Hamas video released on Sunday in which the group urged the Israeli government to halt its aerial and ground offensive and bring about their release. The undated clip ended with the caption: “Tomorrow [Monday] we will inform you of their fate.”
In a statement released with the new video, Hamas’s armed wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam brigades, said the two men, believed to be Yossi Sharabi, 53, and Itay Svirsky, 38, had been killed in “the Zionist army’s bombing”.
I think your point is well made, and I want to expand on it a bit, because it’s a tricky thing for people to make sense of.
Hamas’ militant arm is highly independent. Their civil administration answers to and collaborates with the same leadership, but the civilian leadership has very little control over the fighters, which operate along the lines of a militia, but in concert with a civil administration. So when we say “Hamas”, we could be talking about the administrative workers or the military, and they’re pretty different groups.
This makes describing them difficult. It’s somewhat inaccurate to characterize Hamas as merely a terrorist group, but also as a conventional government. They’re more of an unofficial ruling party that dominates a collapsed state, I think.