The Israeli army announced on Sunday that it had recovered the bodies of six hostages from an underground tunnel in the Rafah area of the southern Gaza Strip and confirmed their return to Israeli territory. The deceased, all taken hostage on October 7, 2023 during the Hamas attack, were identified as Carmel Gat, Eden Yerushalmi, American-Israeli Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Alexander Lobanov, Almog Sarusi and Ori Danino.
Military spokesman Daniel Hagari said this morning that the six hostages were killed by Hamas shortly before troops reached them, according to an initial investigation. Their bodies were located about a kilometer from where Bedouin hostage Kaid Farhan al-Qadi was found alive last week, Hagari said. On Saturday night, the army confirmed the discovery of “several bodies during the fighting” in Gaza and assured that “troops continue to operate in the area and carry out an extraction and identification process.”
97 kidnapped people still haven’t been found; hostages’ families complain about delay in agreement
It has only now become public that the bodies found belong to four men and two women, which reduces the number of people still in captivity to 97, out of the 251 abducted on October 7. Of these, at least 33 are confirmed dead.
Families of the hostages were furious on Sunday after learning of the deaths of their loved ones, saying that if Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had signed a ceasefire agreement with Hamas, they would still be alive. “A deal to return the hostages has been on the table for more than two months. If it weren’t for the delays, sabotage and excuses, those whose deaths we learned about this morning would probably still be alive,” said the Hostages and Families Forum, which announced demonstrations on Sunday in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
Among the dead, many in their 20s, was Hersh Goldberg-Polin, a 24-year-old American-Israeli from California, whose family confirmed his death in a Facebook post. US President Joe Biden sent his condolences in a statement. On October 7, Hersh was at the Nova music festival, where he was kidnapped and injured, forced to wear a tourniquet and had one of his hands amputated, as seen in videos of the attack. Just four months ago, in a propaganda video released by Hamas on April 24, Hersh was seen in good health, reading to the camera a message addressed to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for not doing enough to free the hostages.
Hersh’s family has been one of the most active in the fight for the return of the captives. In November, his mother, Rachel, was one of 12 family members who met with Pope Francis at the Vatican, and both parents have been very vocal about the urgency of reaching a truce agreement. “Hersh, we are working day and night and we will never stop,” Rachel Goldberg-Polin reiterated on August 29, when a delegation of hostages’ families traveled to the Gaza border to demand the release of their loved ones.
Hamas says hostages killed in Israeli bombing, but newspaper says autopsies indicate gunshots to the head
The Islamic terror group Hamas has blamed Israel and the United States, its main partner and arms supplier, for the deaths of the six hostages, saying they died due to Israeli bombing. “The responsibility for the deaths of the prisoners held by the resistance lies with the occupation, which insists on continuing its genocidal war and avoiding an agreement to reach a ceasefire, as well as with the US administration for its bias, support and complicity,” said Izzat al-Rishq, a member of the political bureau of Hamas, the group that controls Gaza. “The discovery of the bodies of the prisoners in the Gaza Strip shows that they were killed exclusively by Zionist bombings,” Al-Rishq added in a statement.
According to the Israeli newspaper Haaretzhowever, the autopsies “indicate that they were all shot in the head and that there is no doubt that they died as a result of the gunshots”, but did not cite the source.
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