There's been a lot of stalled negotiations between Israel and Hamas. One of the sticking points is the return of hostages, which Israel insists as a precondition for any deal. Hamas is responding with pointless things like "If we feel like it, we might return the hostages after Israel gives us a ceasefire and withdraws all their troops from Gaza."

There's one important reason that Hamas isn't going to make a deal involving hostages anytime soon. Most of the hostages are probably dead already. If they say "OK, we will return all the living hostages!", and then turn over 5 people saying "That's all of them!", that probably won't be well received by Israel.

The female hostages have probably all been smuggled out of Gaza via Egypt and sold as sex slaves. I bet a young Jewish female fetches $10M+ on the underground slave market. Remember that in Islam, women captured in battle are fair game for raping and turning them into slaves.

Hamas has also refused to give any "proof of life" for the hostages. It's standard in situations like this to let the Red Cross visit prisoners, which Hamas has refused. Israel responded by declaring that the Red Cross is no longer allowed to visit Palestinians held in Israel's prisons.

Israel is making a huge mistake keeping Palestinian prisoners alive. Any living Palestinian prisoner just becomes a bargaining chip in exchange for hostages, encouraging the taking of hostages in the first place. Especially when Israel does dumb stuff like trading 100+ violent prisoners for one hostage. Hamas uses dumb language like calling the people in Israel's prisons as "hostages", like there's a moral equivalence between people arrested for acts of violence and people kidnapped out of their homes by terrorists.

Israel also made a huge mistake not genociding Gaza on Oct 8. Given all the heat Israel is taking, it would have been less blowback for them to just murder everyone and be done with it. The problem with "minimizing civilian casualties" is that it drags out the war for months and leads to a steady drip feed of casualties and negative press and protests. If Israel had already genocided Gaza on Oct 10, what would there be left for the Hamas protestors to riot for?

Israel also should have taken a hard line from the beginning "No food or water allowed into Gaza until ALL the hostages, and the bodies of any dead hostages, are returned." That was another huge mistake.