I'm John Bache with Bill Rajo, a foundation for the defense of democracies, my colleague

and co-host, and we're speaking with Seth Fransman, Bill's colleague at the Foundation for the

Defense of Democracy, who is importantly the senior Middle East correspondent from

the Jerusalem Post covering the Gaza War and right now the hostages returns.

Bill you have a question for Seth.

Yes, Seth, do we know how many children and how many senior hostages remain?

And do you get the feeling that Hamas is using the hostage situation

to drag out a ceasefire in order to garner,

the longer that Hamas and Israel have a ceasefire the harder it's going to be to

Israel to resume combat operations. So yeah what's the sense of how many hostages are

being held? The last number I think I saw in 177. So and there are some there are still children and women involved in that. So I wouldn't want to put a number out, but it seems to be still you know dozens or so of the children and mothers.

And when they say women, there's a whole bunch of other women that are not not in that

equation that they kind of define as, you know, younger women that were

kidnapped. So we don't know the overall demographic of the 100 and whatever it was left of that number like 150. Is it half women or something like that?

We just don't know the full details. We know that some of them are apparently the soldiers. I'm sure that that's more sensitive in terms of, you know, what Israel doesn't necessarily want to say, well, this soldier or that soldier because that would give him us information.

So there's probably lack of clarity in some pieces of those numbers and there's probably lack of

clarity as well that you know they're once or twice I think that terrorist groups have said so and so was killed or so and so was killed,

then we found out one of them was alive and they brought her back.

So there's a lot of question marks out there.

In terms of, I think what was the second part of your question, whether or not it would make it

harder for Israel to continue this operation?

Yes, that's correct.

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