The Israeli army demanded on Wednesday that the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) be given access to Israeli and foreign hostages held since October 7 by the Palestinian movement Hamas and its allies in the Gaza Strip. The territory is under intense Israeli bombardment. Every minute in captivity puts the lives of the hostages at stake, said army spokesman Daniel Hagari, the international community must act. The Red Cross must have access to the hostages , he said. A target of criticism in Israel, the ICRC told French news agency AFP at the end of November that it did not know where the hostages were, and could not access them because their captors had not agreed How we work This news story has been written and carefully fact-checked by an external editorial team. At SWI swissinfo.ch we select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools such as DeepL to translate it into English. Providing you with automatically translated news