An Israeli hostage freed by the IDF in August reportedly told his rescuers that he had heard a woman speaking Hebrew shortly before his extraction from a tunnel in southern Gaza’s Rafah.

Nonetheless, the army failed to take his testimony into account, and six other hostages were executed nearby when their Hamas guards heard Israeli troops approaching days later.

Farhan al-Qadi testified that he heard a woman say “Good morning,” in Hebrew several weeks before his August 27 rescue, Channel 12 reported on Saturday.

Qadi immediately informed his rescuers of what he had heard and repeated the assertion during his debriefing by the IDF and Shin Bet, which took place before Hamas executed female hostages Eden Yerushalmi and Carmel Gat along with Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Ori Danino, Alex Lobanov and Almog Sarusi on August 29.

Only on August 31 did the IDF decide to briefly halt its activities in Rafah’s Tel Sultan neighborhood where the hostages were found, as it held a fresh assessment on the possibility that additional captives were in the area.
The bodies of the six hostages were discovered hours later and returned to Israel.

The Channel 12 discovery came days after the IDF presented its findings from an investigation into the hostages’ execution, including an assertion that troops did not have any concrete intelligence that there were any Israeli captives in the area where they were operating.

The IDF said Tuesday that its probe determined that troops only had general indications that Israeli abductees could be in the area, but nothing more.

The army asserted that forces operated carefully due to such a possibility, even though the military had assessed that no captives were being held in the area.

The IDF’s probe found that it was aware of possible hostages in the area, and despite the chance being seen as low, the military operated in a careful manner.

The IDF said it had drawn various conclusions from the incident, from the strategic to the tactical level, including regarding the army’s intelligence.

Ultimately, the military acknowledges it failed in its mission to bring those hostages back home alive.

The IDF probe also confirms that forensic findings located in the area of the tunnel indicate that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, who was later killed in the area in October, was at the location at some point. The IDF was unable to confirm if he was in the tunnel at the same time the hostages were.

There have been reports that the six may have served as human shields for Sinwar until they were executed.

Several of the hostages attempted to fight off their killers and defend each other before being executed, their families were reportedly told by the Israel Defense Forces.