Sabra neighborhood, Gaza City · 2000s
Killing of Ahmed Yassin
On 22 March 2004, Hamas founder Ahmed Yassin, 67, was killed in an Israeli military airstrike as he left dawn prayers in Gaza City, along with several companions and bystanders.
What happened
On the morning of 7 October 2023, Palestinian militant groups led by Hamas launched a coordinated assault on southern Israel, killing approximately 1,200 civilians and soldiers and abducting 251 people to the Gaza Strip. Those taken included children, women, elderly people, soldiers, and festival-goers; about half held foreign or dual citizenship, including nationals of Thailand, Nepal, the Philippines, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Some Negev Bedouin Israelis were also among the hostages. Two hostage standoffs occurred inside Israel itself, at homes in Ofakim and Be'eri, with only four of 17 hostages held inside Israel surviving.
Hostages were dispersed across multiple locations in Gaza, reportedly held by different Hamas members and factions as well as other militant groups. The International Committee of the Red Cross was repeatedly denied access to hostages by Hamas. Reports and later hostage testimony described minimal food and water, confiscation of medical equipment, physical assault, sexual violence, administration of psychoactive drugs, and prolonged isolation. Israel's Health Ministry found released hostages had lost significant body weight, and multiple hospital directors described malnutrition, orthopedic injuries, and psychological trauma comparable to accounts from historical atrocities.
Negotiations, led primarily by Qatar with involvement from Egypt, the United States, and others, produced a four-day ceasefire beginning 22 November 2023, during which 105 hostages were released in exchange for 150 Palestinian prisoners. Additional releases followed sporadically, including humanitarian releases of American and elderly Israeli hostages in October 2023, and one Russian-Israeli hostage released outside any ceasefire framework in November 2023. Israeli forces also conducted rescue operations, including the recovery of a captured IDF private in October 2023 and the rescue of two Argentinian-Israeli hostages during Operation Golden Hand in February 2024, during which dozens of Palestinians were reportedly killed.
A number of hostages died in captivity or were killed during the war, including three men — Alon Shamriz, Yotam Haim, and Samer Talalka — killed in a December 2023 friendly-fire incident by Israeli troops who misidentified them as threats. An Israeli military investigation concluded the soldiers acted appropriately given their understanding at the time. Other hostages, including Hersh Goldberg-Polin, were found executed by captors in a Rafah tunnel in August 2024, according to Israeli officials; Hamas denied this and attributed deaths to Israeli airstrikes.
A January 2025 ceasefire resulted in the release of additional hostages in exchange for roughly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners. The Gaza peace plan announced by U.S. President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in late September 2025 led to the release of the remaining 20 living hostages on 13 October 2025, alongside the return of several deceased hostages' remains. The final hostage, police officer Ran Gvili, whose body Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad said they could not locate, was recovered by Israeli forces from a cemetery in northern Gaza on 26 January 2026, marking the first time since 2014 that no Israeli hostages remained in Gaza.
The hostage crisis significantly shaped the course and negotiations of the wider Gaza war, with the fate of hostages cited by involved parties, humanitarian organizations, and international bodies as a central and legally fraught aspect of the conflict.
