Twelve years after Lt. Hadar Goldin HY”D was killed and abducted during Operation Protective Edge, new details have emerged about the years-long Israeli intelligence effort that located the tunnel where Hamas held his body and ultimately helped bring him home in November 2025, Ynet reports.
The effort was led by a small intelligence team called “Lehavi Banayich” — “To Bring Your Sons” — established by Col. M., a 51-year-old intelligence officer from central Israel. He was joined initially by two female reserve officers identified as S. and D., with additional professionals later joining the operation. The team worked for nearly nine years to locate Goldin and gather intelligence connected to other Israelis held in Gaza.
The team was established after then-IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot and Lior Lotan, who was responsible at the time for the prisoners and missing persons portfolio, asked M. in 2015 to reexamine the cases of Goldin and Staff Sgt. Oron Shaul. Its work was later expanded to include Israeli civilians Avera Mengistu and Hisham al-Sayed.
Goldin was abducted on August 1, 2014, after his Givati reconnaissance force was ambushed in Rafah’s al-Tanur neighborhood after a ceasefire had taken effect. The unit’s commander, Maj. Benaya Sarel, and Staff Sgt. Liel Gidoni were killed alongside him. Goldin was struck by gunfire and taken into a tunnel by Hamas terrorists. It was only later determined that he had been killed at the scene.
Hamas announced the following day that it had lost contact with the cell that abducted Goldin and claimed the tunnel had collapsed in an Israeli airstrike. The initial Israeli working assumption was therefore that Goldin’s body had been buried inside the tunnel with his abductors.
M. challenged that conclusion. He determined that the first Israeli strike capable of collapsing the tunnel occurred one hour and 50 minutes after the abduction. Even while moving slowly with a body, he reasoned, the terrorists could have carried Goldin far beyond the area struck by the Israeli Air Force.
The team also obtained what was described as a “golden intelligence report” indicating that Hamas’ Nukhba force had removed the body of an Israeli soldier from a tunnel. Under Hamas procedure, M. explained, the abducting cell was expected to transfer a captive or body to a separate compartmentalization unit, which would move it to a secret location without informing the original abductors. The team concluded that Hamas’ Rafah Brigade was holding Goldin.
Investigators then questioned soldiers and officers who had entered the abduction tunnel and reviewed footage from their helmet cameras. They discovered Arabic graffiti corresponding to the names of streets above the tunnel. Combined with smoke released during an IDF tunnel-mapping operation, the markings allowed the team to reconstruct the tunnel’s route and narrow the search to a specific area.
S., who had experience operating a technological system that could review earlier events in Gaza, examined vehicle movements around hospitals and clinics in Rafah. She eventually identified an ambulance that reached Yousef al-Najjar Hospital several hours after Goldin’s abduction.
Footage showed several people emerging from a house located along the tunnel route and loading a large, elongated black bag into the ambulance. S. stressed that she could not determine with certainty that it contained a body. The team later reviewed Hamas radio communications and intercepted a message from those inside the ambulance saying that “the mission will be completed in the coming minutes.”
The investigators then focused on Yousef al-Najjar Hospital, examining its morgue, refrigeration facilities and the possibility that part of the hospital was reserved for Hamas’ military wing. This was also when the team first connected Hamas doctor Marwan al-Hams, who later became the hospital’s director, to the Goldin case.
Seeking to force Hamas into making a mistake, Israeli intelligence used two Palestinian collaborators suspected of having been turned into double agents. The team understood that Hamas was likely listening when one of them communicated with his Israeli handler and used those conversations to create the impression that Israel was closing in on Goldin’s location.
The deception eventually prompted Mohammed Shabana, commander of Hamas’ Rafah Brigade, to send several men to inspect a mosque in Rafah. Israeli intelligence tracked them as they entered the mosque, remained there for roughly an hour and later returned home. Shabana subsequently told his men that everything was in order. Israel concluded that the mosque provided access to an emergency Hamas tunnel, although the precise location inside the tunnel where Goldin was being held remained unknown.
Israel knew the location of the tunnel for approximately four years, but no ground operation was authorized during that period. The intelligence effort was revived after October 7, when M. joined the IDF’s command for hostages and missing persons, led by Maj. Gen. (res.) Nitzan Alon.
When the IDF began operating in Rafah, the hostage command enlisted Brig. Gen. Itzik Cohen, commander of the 162nd Division and a former commander of Goldin, to support the operation. M. then joined the naval commando commander, who agreed to lead a task force composed of naval commandos and Yahalom combat-engineering troops. Their objective was to reach the mosque in Rafah’s Yabna neighborhood and enter the tunnel.
The underground complex was far more extensive than expected. According to Yahalom soldiers, they had never encountered a tunnel like it. It extended for approximately seven kilometers across three levels and contained blockades, booby traps, concealed doors and rooms that could only be discovered by breaking through the walls.
In July 2024, troops attempted to open one of the concealed doors when shouting was heard from the other side and gunfire was directed at them. It was later determined that the men were guards protecting Mohammed Sinwar and Mohammed Shabana and that the area served as their command center. The two fled following the encounter, leading to the breakdown of Hamas’ command-and-control structure in Rafah and, afterward, the collapse and flight of the entire Rafah Brigade.
Israeli intelligence later received information that Marwan al-Hams had personally brought Goldin’s body into the tunnel, preserved it and locked it behind an iron door. Israeli forces subsequently seized al-Hams from Gaza in a covert operation after he was lured to what he believed would be a television interview for a fictitious documentary. He refused to provide information during questioning, even after being taken into the tunnel by the Israeli team.
The search inside the tunnel was suspended between August 2024 and January 2025 because insufficient combat forces were available. After it resumed, Yahalom troops searched the complex room by room for approximately six months. They located the room where Goldin’s body had apparently been examined during a Hamas deception operation, but concluded that it had subsequently been moved elsewhere in the tunnel.
Following the elimination of Mohammed Sinwar and Mohammed Shabana in a tunnel beneath the European Hospital in Khan Yunis, Israeli forces discovered that Shabana had been carrying Goldin’s personal weapon. Another item of intelligence significance was also recovered from the tunnel ruins, but renewed searches of the Rafah tunnel still failed to locate Goldin.
After the October 2025 ceasefire agreement, Hamas continued claiming that it could not reach Goldin. Israel eventually provided precise information about his location and placed pressure on Hamas terrorists trapped in what became known as the “Rafah pocket.” Hamas returned Goldin to Israel on November 9, 2025, and he was brought to burial two days later.
M. described the operation as a victory because the effort to bring Goldin home also contributed to the destruction of Hamas’ Rafah Brigade.
(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)
One Response
Boruch Hatov veHameitiv, that Hadar Goldin Hy”d was brought to kevurah. All the yidden who helped make that possible should be benched for all doros for their major commitments and mesirus nefesh.