American Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC)special forces worked with Israeli counterparts last October to carry out a rescue mission to extract American citizens who were among the Israelis captured by Hamas in the October 7 massacre, the Washington Post reported on Friday. The mission did not take place because there was not sufficient intelligence as to the precise location of the captives.
“If we managed to unilaterally get information that we could act on, and we thought we could actually get U.S. people out alive, we could act, but there was genuinely very little information specifically about U.S. hostages,” one official told the Post.
According to the report, the United States provided intelligence to the IDF, which was used to locate and eventually rescue four Israeli hostages held in captivity in Gaza last week.
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Anti-terrorism special forces after the successful extraction of Israeli hostages from Gaza
(Photo: Dana Kopel )
The information, including overhead imagery, appeared to have been secondary to information the IDF had gathered on its own, the paper wrote in its report, which relied on dozens of current and former Israeli and American officials most of whom spoke on condition of anonymity.
Since the war began, the U.S. has increased its intelligence gathering on Hamas and has strengthened its cooperation with Israel, providing it with an " using advanced software, some of it powered by artificial intelligence," officials told the paper.
After concerns were raised about the possible misuse of the intelligence by Israel, to go after mid-level Hamas leaders and not exclusively to secure the rescue of hostages or eliminate senior Hamas leaders, officials said that the Israelis were careful about how the information provided to the by the U.S. was used.
Israeli officials also said that although they were grateful to the United States for its intelligence sharing among many other things, the Israeli military intelligence could have also obtained the same information.
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Shlomi Ziv, Andrey Kozlov, Almog Meir, Noa Argamani
(Photo: Marko Djurica / Reuters, IDF)
Israel gathered information from prisoners it detained in its operation in Gaza to pinpoint the location of the hostages it extracted in Saturday's operation.
The Jewish Chronical reported on Friday, that Israeli special forces rented an apartment in the Nuseirat camp ahead of the extraction of the four hostages. They had positioned themselves there to confirm the accuracy of information provided by Hamas terrorists in interrogations.