Forty of the hostages Hamas took alive on October 7, 2023 died in captivity. Their captors killed most of them; Israeli military fire killed some by mistake. Mirjana Spoljaric, President of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), says pressure could likely have prevented some of those deaths.
In an interview with The New York Times published Saturday, Spoljaric said pressure for the hostages' release should have come sooner. "I personally think that the pressure should have come earlier in the negotiations," she said. "We could have saved more lives."
Hamas seized 251 hostages on October 7, 2023, three years ago. They returned home in several deals over two years of war. The earliest releases came weeks after the Hamas-led massacre. The last came in October 2025.
What the Red Cross Could and Couldn't Do
The ICRC, a neutral international body dedicated to aiding victims of war, faced heavy criticism in Israel for failing to secure meaningful help for the captives. It never visited them. It didn't monitor their conditions or deliver basic humanitarian assistance, such as medicine.
Spoljaric didn't dodge that. During the war, she met with then-Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, holding "tough discussions" with both. But she drew a hard distinction between access and release. "Visiting hostages is much more complicated than bringing them back," she 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."
Time worked against everyone, she said. "We know how important it is to negotiate them out as quickly as possible. So the objective always has to be to bring the hostages back. And the longer it takes, the more complicated it becomes."
Access Denied on Both Sides
The hostages' families have a legitimate grievance. Their relatives vanished into Gaza with no outside verification of their welfare. The Red Cross couldn't change that.
A parallel problem emerged on the Israeli side. Israel blocked the ICRC from visiting Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, in retaliation. The issue began to be resolved after the High Court of Justice ruled the ban invalid. Spoljaric told The New York Times that whatever Israel's reasons for preventing access, it had "a legal obligation" and, "in my opinion also a moral obligation," to allow Red Cross visits under the Geneva Conventions.
The Geneva Conventions don't make an exception for retaliation. Neither Hamas's refusal to allow visits to hostages nor Israel's ban on visits to Palestinian detainees can be squared with them, and the ICRC's neutrality meant it pressed both sides.
Gaza a Year Into the Ceasefire
A U.S.-brokered ceasefire halted major fighting in Gaza a year ago. The IDF has continued near-daily strikes against people it deems a threat.
Spoljaric returned to comments she made to the BBC in 2025, when she described Gaza as "hell on earth." Her assessment hasn't changed. "What I said about Gaza is still valid today," she told The New York Times. "What happened to Gaza and in Gaza to Palestinians and Israelis supersedes every legal, moral and humane standard."
She named what remains after the guns went quiet. "The worst now is the fact that people are deprived of human dignity."
Why This Matters:
The head of the world's most prominent neutral humanitarian body says on the record that late pressure cost lives. That judgment cuts in more than one direction. Forty hostages died in captivity, and Palestinian detainees lost access to the Red Cross under a ban Israel's own High Court found invalid. Spoljaric's point—that the Geneva Conventions bind both sides regardless of the other's conduct—is the legal principle that gets lost whenever access becomes a bargaining chip. A year into a ceasefire that still allows near-daily strikes, her description of Gaza as a place where people are stripped of dignity suggests the humanitarian emergency has outlasted the war's headline phase. For families on both sides, the question of what earlier pressure might have changed is not abstract.