Red Cross chief says she tried to arrange Gaza hostage visits through talks with Hamas's Haniyeh

International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) President Mirjana Spoljaric said that she met former Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Qatar on two separate occasions with the goal of arranging a visit by the organization to Israeli hostages held in Gaza, making the comment as part of an interview on Saturday with New York Times reporter Lulu Garcia-Navarro."These were tough discussions, and trust me, we are very frank in these meetings," said Spoljaric, noting that she further met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the issue. "This is why these meetings have to always remain confidential."When Garcia-Navarro asked the Swiss-Croatian diplomat whether the ICRC had any access to the hostages, Spoljaric shook her head.She described the issue of visiting hostages as "much more complicated" than returning them home, saying that the ICRC can only "work with the tools that we have.""In my opinion, they should have come back unconditionally as of day one," she said. "But that's not the reality in which we operate."In August 2025, the mothers of former hostages Evyatar David, Nimrod Cohen, Guy Gilboa-Dalal, and David and Ariel Cunio met with Spoljaric in Geneva, pushing for the organization to visit their loved ones in Gaza.In addition, eight of the hostages released during the December 2025 temporary ceasefire wrote a letter to the ICRC asking them to visit the then-137 remaining hostages. No such visits ever took place. Spoljaric: Nothing more 'complex,' 'brutal' than act of hostage-takingSpoljaric, who has led the ICRC since 2022 and says she visited Gaza several times amid the war, told the NYT that there is "nothing more complex, and to a certain extent also more brutal, than hostage-taking.""The objective always has to be to bring the hostages back," she explained. "And the longer it takes, the more complicated it becomes. I personally think that pressure should have come earlier in the negotiations. We could have saved more lives. And this was the subject of our conversations."She cited the organization's "strict insistence on neutrality" as having been vital in the eventual return of many of the Gaza hostages to Israel."You've seen the pictures of our colleagues unarmed among thousands, if not tens of thousands, of armed men, surrounded by rubble from which there was no escape," she emphasized. "Nobody would have trusted us to be able to do this highly complex operation if we hadn't defended our neutrality over 160 years. You tweak it once, you become political, and that's it. I know it makes so many people angry, but that's the essence of our mission."Israel has 'moral,' 'legal' obligation to allow visits to detainees, Spoljaric saysRegarding ICRC visits to Israeli security detainees, which were halted following the October 7 massacre, Spoljaric claimed that Israel had both a "moral" and "legal" obligation to reinstate them."We need to inform the families about the whereabouts of or the fate of their relatives," she said. "You capture a soldier; this person is detained, but a soldier is not, per se, a criminal."Responding to a question regarding the treatment of one's enemy, she noted the "dehumanization" of combatants who engage in torture and other illegal actions."If you tell your soldiers, 'Go and kill women and children, go rape them, looting is allowed, it's our strategy,' these people dehumanize themselves. They will never be able to return to a normal life."Jerusalem Post Staff and Reuters contributed to this report.