Militant group claims it needs ‘time’ to find all the people it abducted to Gaza.
A Hamas official said the militant group will not release hostages it took during its violent attack on October 7 until Israel agrees to a cease-fire.
Abu Hamid, a member of the Hamas delegation that visited Moscow on Thursday, told the Russian state-controlled Kommersant newspaper that the group also needs time to locate all the hostages in Gaza.
In an interview with the Russian outlet, Abu Hamid said his group “captured dozens of people, most of them civilians, and we need time to find them in the Gaza Strip and then liberate them.”
I mean, running a competent, centralized organization where the top clearly controls the lower levels and knows what’s going on would seem somewhat dangerous if you’re running an underground terrorist organization, because there’s a very high chance the leadership of such an group will get targeted, and since they will have fewer resources than their opponent, theres a good chance that leadership will eventually end up captured or killed. If the rest of the organization relies on the top, or the top knows where and who the members all are, then this will probably destroy the organization. So, there’s incentive for such an organization to be distributed and decentralized to some extent. Further, it won’t be staffed by highly trained professionals, but by whoever can be sufficiently motivated to join it, which isn’t going to lead to a high degree of competence, just zealotry.