“There will be no pause without the return of hostages and missing persons,” Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, said in a written statement to The New York Times this week.

Hamas leaders have since claimed that their group does not have control over all of those captives because other Gaza factions, including Palestinian Islamic Jihad, also entered Israel that day and took some hostages of their own.

The issue, they said, was that communications were spotty — the Hamas leaders struggled to make quick, consistent contact between Qatar and Gaza — and worsened when Israel cut telecommunication networks as it launched its ground offensive.

Hamas’s apparent lack of control over all the captives, coupled with the ground invasion, have made it more difficult for the group to round up those slated for release and to deliver them safely to Israel, according to three of the officials with knowledge of the matter.

Israel dispatched David Barnea, the chief of its Mossad intelligence agency, to Qatar to negotiate the hostage deal with Hamas indirectly through Qatari mediators in the days before the ground invasion.

Ron Dermer, a top adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, told reporters last week that Israel had twice briefly ceased military operations in some areas in Gaza in order to facilitate the safe evacuation of the hostages released by Hamas.

The original article contains 1,220 words, the summary contains 222 words. Saved 82%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!