Red Cross officials have not yet been allowed to visit hostages that Hamas is holding in Gaza, multiple sources have told CNN – a violation of an agreement struck between Israel and Hamas, which stipulated that the Red Cross would be able to visit the hostages by the end of the fourth day of the truce.
US President Joe Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan said over the weekend that as a part of the Israel-Hamas truce agreement, Red Cross officials would be able to visit hostages still held captive in Gaza “by the end of the fourth day.” Another source familiar with the terms of the agreement echoed that this was an aspect of the deal.
There are also more than 30 hostages being held by other groups, and several of the hostages who were captured by Hamas are no longer being held by Hamas, and some others who were captured by PIJ were released by Hamas.
To the best of my knowledge, this is the ICRC international who are supposed to visit the hostages, as they have been facilitating the release of both the hostages and the prisoners.
At this point, I think the families just want to know if their loved ones are still alive and don’t care one bit if it’s the ICRC or PRCS.
I agree it really doesn’t matter who it is. Just wanted to make sure that this wasn’t some confusion.
I get that, and that’s the rational way of looking at it. Hamas aren’t rational, though. They’re a Salafist extremist group in a region that is continuously being bombed by the Christian West and thus not likely to accept anything with a Christian cross on it. It would be like having Perjury Greene sworn in on a Quaran or the Torah.
If part of the deal was that it HAS to be Red CROSS rather than Crescent, whomever drafted it is either incompetent or deliberately sabotaging the process.
The pictures of the hostages being released are pretty clear it’s ICRC red cross, not PRCS that are handling that part at a minimum.
The deal text itself is not public to the best of my knowledge, so there’s nothing to really go on.