The International Committee of the Red Cross is about to emerge as a top player in a much-anticipated Gaza hostage-release deal, as the Geneva-based organization is denying any role in an American-backed agreement that calls on its representatives to visit hostages that remain in captivity. 

If the first batch of a dozen children and women abducted by Hamas reaches Gaza’s Rafah crossing as expected tomorrow morning, they are to be accompanied by Red Cross representatives. Once the newly reached deal is completed, some 50 of the 238 hostages — 38 children and 12 women — are scheduled to be released in four days.

Yet, what about other vulnerable hostages, such as the elderly and sick? What guarantees does Israel have that all are alive? 

Quoting the written pact, Prime Minister Netanyahu told reporters Wednesday that it includes a Hamas agreement to give the ICRC full access to the hostages who are not included in the deal, and to allow the group to tend to their medical needs. “I hear that the Red Cross is saying that they never heard of this. Well, here it is,” he said. “It was agreed by the other side, and I expect the Red Cross to do their duty.” 

“This is a critical detail,” Niva Wenkert, whose son, Omer, is held in Gaza, told an Israeli broadcaster, Kan. Abducted October 7 during a rave party at Re’im, and unlikely to be released in the current round, Omer suffers from colitis. “He was stable when taken,” his mother told Y-Net, but without medication, “his intestines could burst,” endangering his life, she said of her son. 

The abduction of civilians — including toddlers less than a year old, the sick, the elderly, and women, including one who was nine months pregnant — is a war crime. Yet, the Gaza terrorist organizations believe the hostages are their ace card. Israeli family members almost uniformly say they are thus riding “an emotional rollercoaster” as snippets of information, disinformation, and misinformation emerge from Gaza. 

In one such knife-twist, a spokesman for the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, who is known as Abu Hamza, announced on Wednesday the death of a 77-year-old hostage, Hanna Katzir. There was no Israeli confirmation.

The spokesman claimed the PIJ had offered to release Katzir, but the “enemy’s procrastination led to the loss of her life.” His organization disclaims “our responsibility towards our enemy prisoners in light of the barbaric bombing,” he added. 

Earlier, Katzir became a source of anguish in Israel when, along with another abductee, 13-year-old Yagil Yaakov, she was forced to pose for a hostage video, in which she denounced Mr. Netanyahu in Hebrew. “The Jihad fighters did everything for us to be healthy,” she added. 

Until very recently, the ICRC all but ignored such torture, which the Israel Defense Forces spokesman, Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, on Wednesday called hostage-related “psychological terror.”

“We cannot force our way into where hostages are held, we can only visit them when agreements, including safe access, are in place,” the ICRC president, Mirjana Spoljaric Egger, told reporters last week. She addressed growing criticism of the organization’s handling of the Gaza hostage situation.

After a meeting with the Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh, at Doha on Monday, Ms. Egger insisted that “the ICRC has persistently called for the immediate release of hostages.” She said it is “insisting that our teams be allowed to visit the hostages to check on their welfare and deliver medications, and for the hostages to be able to communicate with their families.”

If such calls were indeed persistent, they were not made publicly prior to that Doha visit. ICRC officials reasoned with Israeli interlocutors that unlike in the case of state armies holding prisoners of war, it has little jurisdiction over unrecognized organizations like Hamas. Yet, after meeting Ms. Egger at Geneva last week, Israel’s foreign minister, Eli Cohen, said that the ICRC has “no right to exist if it does not succeed in visiting the hostages” at Gaza. 

While the Red Cross was mostly mum about the Israeli hostages, it was vocal about how Gaza “hospitals risk turning into morgues,” as the organization’s regional director, Fabrizio Carboni, said in October. Medical centers like Gaza’s largest, al-Shifa hospital, are “specially protected facilities under international humanitarian law,” the ICRC said on November 10. “Any military operation around hospitals must consider the presence of civilians, who are protected under international humanitarian law.”

The laws of war, though, do permit attacking hospitals that serve as military installations, and Shifa is “the sensitive nerve center” of Hamas’s war machine, Admiral Hagari said Wednesday. He shared new discoveries by the IDF, including a large war room and an escape tunnel dug directly in the main hospital building.

A third of the ICRC’s budget is financed by America, which paid nearly $700 million to the organization last year. To justify that funding, the organization may need to change some of its ways, which have so far been less than helpful in one of its top mandates: the release of hostages.