Hamas loses contact with Israeli-American prisoner Trump sought to free after bombing

The Israelis appear to have Edan Alexander him in one of their bombing sprees on Tuesday.

Trump’s now-reassigned hostage envoy Adam Boehler made headlines last month when enraged Israelis leaked the news that he was directly dealing with Hamas without involving them. At the time, Boehler was in talks with the Palestinian resistance primarily to secure the release of Israeli-American dual citizen Edan Alexander.

Tamer Almisshal of Al Jazeera later revealed that Trump wanted Hamas to release Alexander as a gesture of goodwill to the American president with nothing in exchange. Trump would then tweet thanking Hamas for its gesture which would be followed by a release of a handful of Israeli soldiers at regular intervals in exchange for a limited number of its Palestinian hostages in Israeli dungeons, and a trickle of aid into Gaza. Hamas categorically refused to entertain the proposal, showing no interest in releasing Alexander for nothing in return, having captured him from an Israeli tank of all places on October 7.

All those dealings may no longer matter. Alexander is unlikely to walk free from Gaza. The Israelis appear to have killed him in one of their bombing sprees on Tuesday.

In a series of updates on Tuesday evening, Abu Obeida, the spokesman of Hamas’s military wing Al-Qassam Brigades, revealed that contact with the team in charge of Alexander has been lost after Israelis directly targeted the location where he was held.

“We announce that we have lost contact with the team guarding soldier Edan Alexander following a direct Israeli bombardment targeting their location,” Abu Obeida wrote. “We are still trying to reach them.”

The Qassam Brigades spokesman further added that the Israeli attack appeared deliberate in order to relieve the “pressure caused by the dual-citizen prisoners” in Hamas’s captivity in Gaza: “It seems that the occupation army is deliberately trying to kill him and hence relieve themselves from the pressure caused by the dual-citizen prisoners in order to continue its genocide against our people.”

Exactly an hour after Abu Obeida’s announcement, Al-Qassam released a short video with the title “Be prepared, soon your children will return in black coffins.” It showed one of the handovers of the remains of the Israeli prisoners during the prisoner exchanges earlier this year:

The video can be interpreted as a tacit acknowledgement that Alexander is dead — killed by the Israelis.

Just three days ago on April 12, Alexander had appeared in a Hamas video in which he was seen pleading with the Israeli and American leadership to free him from captivity, complaining of mental and physical collapse after enduring over 550 days in Gaza amidst relentless Israeli bombings.

At one point in the video Alexander asks rhetorically, “Why am I not in America? Or with my family?” Just a second later, he answers his own questions, “I came to Israel to serve in the Golani Brigade. I am a lone soldier. On October 7, I was alone at the post against an entire army [a reference to the Palestinian resistance fighters].”

The so-called Golani Brigade is one of the most barbaric units of the Israeli military and has played a major role in wreaking havoc in Gaza as well as Lebanon over the course of the ongoing genocide.

It is no wonder, then, that the Palestinians were unwilling to let go off such a prized catch so easily. He was worth a few hundred Palestinian abductees at a minimum.

It was probably his value — and the fact that US leadership had directly engaged with Hamas to secure his release without informing them — that led the Israelis to conclude it was better to eliminate him, as Abu Obeida insinuated in his updates on Tuesday.

To be sure, Hamas earlier this month did warn that the lives of Israeli captives were in danger. As I reported in these pages on April 5, Hamas had categorically stated that the latest evacuation orders in Gaza had endangered the lives of half of the Israeli captives. Hamas further added that there were no plans to evacuate those captives, who were under threat from relentless Israeli strikes. Its warning now appears to have come true.

With an American citizen likely gone, the sense of urgency on the US’s part is now also gone with him. The US no longer needs to open alternate channels of negotiations behind the Israelis’ back to secure its citizen’s freedom, and can now delegate the task of resolving the stalled negotiations even more to the Israelis — a perfect outcome for Tel Aviv, which has shown no interest in a permanent ceasefire deal.

Moreover, just as they blamed their murder of the Bibas family on Hamas, it would surprise no one if they pin the blame for Alexander’s death on the Palestinians and use it as a pretext to escalate their assault on Gaza even further.

Hamas, for its part, may have lost a valuable bargaining chip, but its fundamental demands are unlikely to be impacted by Alexander’s death. In a March 2024 speech, Abu Obeida had declared that Israel’s killing of its prisoners in Gaza doesn’t change the resistance’s equation in prisoner exchanges: “We affirm that the price we will take for five living prisoners or ten is the same price we would have taken for all prisoners had they not been killed by the enemy’s bombing operations.”

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