Mirjana Spoljaric says earlier pressure in negotiations could have saved lives: 40 people abducted alive were killed in captivity, most by their captors and some mistakenly by IDF fire. The President of the International Committee of the Red Cross made the assessment in an interview with The New York Times published Saturday. She described efforts to press Israel and Hamas to prioritise the hostages’ release while the organisation couldn’t visit them.
Pressure, After the Fact
Hamas seized 251 hostages on October 7, 2023. Several deals released them over two years of war. The first releases came weeks after the Hamas-led massacre; the last came in October 2025. Spoljaric said the deaths of those abducted alive could likely have been prevented.
“I personally think that the pressure should have come earlier in the negotiations. We could have saved more lives,” she told the newspaper. Her account puts timing at the centre of the question: pressure for release, she said, should have come sooner, while the people held captive remained subject to their captors’ decisions and negotiations between powerful actors.
“Visiting hostages is much more complicated than bringing them back,” Spoljaric said. “And in my opinion, they should have come back unconditionally as of Day 1. But that's not the reality in which we operate, and so we have to work with the tools we have.” She added that the objective had to be bringing them back as quickly as possible, because “the longer it takes, the more complicated it becomes.”
During the war, Spoljaric met with then-Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and held “tough discussions” with both. The ICRC is a neutral international body dedicated to aiding victims of war. Yet neutrality gave it neither access to the hostages nor the power to secure their release. In Israel, the organisation faced heavy criticism for failing to secure meaningful aid, monitor conditions or provide basic humanitarian assistance such as medicine.
Access Denied on Both Sides
Israel blocked the ICRC from visiting Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails in retaliation. The High Court of Justice ruled the ban invalid, and the issue was beginning to be resolved. Spoljaric said Israel had “a legal obligation” and, “in my opinion also a moral obligation,” to allow Red Cross visits in accordance with the Geneva Conventions, whatever its reasons for preventing access.
The hostages’ captivity and the denial of visits to Palestinian prisoners aren’t interchangeable events. But both accounts place access to detained people in the hands of authorities and armed actors, while the humanitarian body’s demands depend on those actors letting it through. The ICRC can press and negotiate. It couldn’t visit the hostages, and Israel barred it from Palestinian prisoners.
Gaza Under the Ceasefire
A U.S.-brokered ceasefire had halted major fighting in the Gaza Strip a year earlier. The IDF continued near-daily strikes against people it deemed a threat. Spoljaric said her 2025 description of Gaza as “hell on earth” still applied. “What happened to Gaza and in Gaza to Palestinians and Israelis supersedes every legal, moral and humane standard,” she told The New York Times. “The worst now is the fact that people are deprived of human dignity.”
Her remarks describe a system in which hostage releases, prison visits and even access to basic humanitarian assistance turn on negotiations and permissions controlled by others. The Red Cross chief says earlier pressure might have saved more lives. The people whose lives were at stake had no such control.