WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump said Tuesday that three hostages held by Hamas in Gaza have died, leaving only 21 believed to be still living.
\n\u201cAs of today, it\u2019s 21, three have died,\u201d Trump said of the hostages being held by Hamas, noting until recently it had been 24 people believed to be living. He did not elaborate on the identities of those now believed to be dead, nor how he had come to learn of their deaths. \u201cThere\u2019s 21, plus a lot of dead bodies,\u201d Trump said.
\nOne American, Edan Alexander, had been among the 24 hostages believed to be alive, with the bodies of several other Americans also held by Hamas after its Oct. 7, 2023 assault on Israel.
\nThe president\u2019s comments came as Israel approved plans on Monday to seize the Gaza Strip and to stay in the Palestinian territory for an unspecified amount of time, in a bid to recover the hostages and try to fulfill its war aims of destroying Hamas. If implemented, the move would vastly expand Israel\u2019s operations there and likely draw fierce international opposition.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump said Tuesday that three hostages held by Hamas in Gaza have died, leaving only 21 believed to be still living. \u201cAs of today, it\u2019s 21, three have died,\u201d Trump said of the hostages being held by Hamas, noting until recently it had been 24 people believed to be living. He did …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":80721,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-80709","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80709","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=80709"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80709\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":80722,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80709\/revisions\/80722"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/80721"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=80709"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=80709"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=80709"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}