Al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, reportedly used Israeli SIM cards—originally planted by the Israeli army for surveillance inside Gaza—to contact the families of Israeli prisoners on the day of their release, according to Israel’s Channel 15, citing a security source.
The report stated that these SIM cards were secretly placed across specific locations in Gaza by Israeli forces as part of an espionage operation to gather intelligence about Israeli captives. However, a number of these cards were activated only hours before the prisoner handover, allowing Al-Qassam members to make direct calls to the prisoners’ families.
From Spy Devices to Tools of Human Communication
This surprising revelation came as Al-Qassam Brigades permitted several Israeli captives to speak with their families via video calls shortly before their release as part of the latest prisoner exchange deal.
Footage broadcast on Israeli media showed parts of these video calls, with the prisoners accompanied by members of the “Shadow Unit,” the Al-Qassam division responsible for safeguarding captives held in Gaza.
In one of the clips, Matan Angrist’s mother appeared speaking with her son. She is known as one of the most vocal leaders in the Israeli families’ movement, which has been pressuring Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government for the past two years to halt the war and secure the release of captives through negotiation.
The Exchange Deal
On Monday, Al-Qassam Brigades released seven out of twenty Israeli prisoners, as part of the ongoing exchange agreement, in return for the release of nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners held by the Israeli occupation — including around 200 serving life or long-term sentences.
This operation not only highlighted the Palestinian resistance’s operational sophistication but also exposed the Israeli military’s intelligence vulnerabilities — turning what was meant to be a spy network into a humanitarian bridge for communication before the captives’ release.
