Julian Borger & Quique Kierszenbaum
The Guardian / September 1, 2024
IDF says Hamas killed captives shortly before bodies found, as families’ group accuses Netanyahu of ‘abandoning’ abductees.
Israel has confirmed the deaths of six more hostages taken in the 7 October attack by Hamas, saying they were killed by their captors shortly before their bodies were found on Saturday in a tunnel complex under Gaza.
“According to our initial estimation, they were brutally murdered by Hamas terrorists a short time before we reached them,” a military spokesperson, R Adm Daniel Hagari, told reporters in an early-morning briefing. Hagari said the bodies had been found during fighting in Rafah about a kilometre from a tunnel where another hostage, Qaid Farhan Alkadi, was rescued by Israeli forces on Tuesday.
The news of the discovery of the bodies brought calls for a mass protest from a hostage family organization, which blamed the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, for failing to agree a hostage-for-peace deal with Hamas that has been under negotiation for several months. The country would “tremble”, the organization warned.
In a written statement, Netanyahu blamed Hamas for blocking the ceasefire agreement.
“These days, while Israel is conducting intensive negotiations with the mediators in a supreme effort to reach a deal, Hamas continues to firmly refuse any proposal … Whoever murders abductees – does not want a deal,” he said.
“We, for our part, did not let up. The Israeli government is committed, and I am personally committed, to continue striving for a deal that will return all our abductees and guarantee our security and existence.”
Unnamed Israeli security officials were quoted in the Israeli press on Sunday blaming Netanyahu’s insistence on holding on to strategic territory in Gaza, as the principal obstacle to a deal. The Israeli defence minister, Yoav Gallant, issued a statement calling for the cabinet to reverse a vote on Thursday to retain control of the Philadelphi Corridor, along Gaza’s border with Egypt.
“It is too late for the hostages who were murdered in cold blood. We must bring back the hostages that are still being held by Hamas,” Gallant said. The defence minister was the only cabinet member to vote to give up control of the Philadelphi Corridor in the interests of a hostage deal.
Eight hostages have been rescued and more than 100 were released in an earlier temporary ceasefire deal in November. The discovery of the six bodies leaves about 100 hostages still unaccounted for in Gaza. The IDF has confirmed 35 of them are known to have died in over 10 months of war in Gaza since the 7 October 2023 attack by Hamas on Israel.
The Israeli military (IDF) first reported on Saturday night that bodies had been found “during combat” but said work was still under way in extracting the remains and then identifying them. Shortly after 7am on Sunday, the military confirmed it had located and recovered the bodies of Carmel Gat, Eden Yerushalmi, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Alexander Lobanov, Almog Sarusi, and Master Sergeant Ori Danino on Saturday from an underground tunnel in the Rafah area in the Gaza Strip.
“They were all taken hostage on 7 October and were murdered by the Hamas terrorist organization in the Gaza Strip,” said an IDF statement. “Following an identification procedure carried out by the National Institute of Forensic Medicine, the Israel police, and the IDF military rabbinate, the IDF manpower directorate’s hostage team, which is responsible for accompanying the families of the hostages, notified their families.
“The IDF and ISA [Israel Security Agency, the Shin Bet] send their heartfelt condolences to the families. The IDF and Israeli security forces are operating with all means to bring home all the hostages as fast as possible.”
Gallant said in a statement: “I commend the IDF and ISA forces for conducting a complex operation to retrieve the bodies of the hostages for burial in Israel.”
An organization representing many relatives of the abductees, the Hostage Families Forum, called for a nationwide protest against the Netanyahu government, which it has long accused of dragging its feet over a hostage deal with Hamas that the US and its regional allies have been trying to broker since the end of May.
“Netanyahu abandoned the abductees. This is now a fact,” the forum said in a statement issued on Saturday night when the first reports emerged of bodies having been found. “Starting tomorrow the country will tremble. We call on the public to prepare to bring the country to a standstill.”
It said in a further statement on Sunday: “These six individuals were taken alive, endured the horrors of captivity, and were then coldly murdered … A deal for the return of the hostages has been on the table for over two months. Were it not for the delays, sabotage, and excuses those whose deaths we learned about this morning would likely still be alive.”
A senior Hamas official, Izzat al-Rishq, blamed the hostages’ deaths on Israel and the US, saying they would still be alive if Israel had accepted a ceasefire proposal that Hamas said it had agreed to in July. He did not give details of how the hostages had died and did not comment on IDF suggestions they had been executed.
Reports in the Israeli press quoted officials as saying that three of the hostages whose bodies were found on Saturday – Goldberg-Polin, Yerushalmi and Gat— would have been released in the first phase of the ceasefire deal under negotiation.
The family of the 23-year-old Israeli-American Goldberg-Polin had confirmed his death a few hours before the IDF named the victims on Sunday.
“With broken hearts, the Goldberg-Polin family is devastated to announce the death of their beloved son and brother, Hersh,” the statement said.
The Goldberg-Polin family had taken the Israeli hostage crisis to the global arena, meeting with world leaders to press their case. Last month, they addressed the Democratic party convention, where the crowd chanted: “Bring them home.”
The family’s announcement was followed by a statement from Joe Biden, saying he was “devastated and outraged”.
“It is as tragic as it is reprehensible,” Biden said. “Make no mistake, Hamas leaders will pay for these crimes. And we will keep working around the clock for a deal to secure the release of the remaining hostages.”
About 250 Israeli hostages were taken in the surprise attack on southern Israel on 7 October, in which Hamas killed 1,200 people. In the war in Gaza that followed, 40,691 Palestinians have been killed according to the latest estimate by the Palestinian health ministry.
Biden, speaking to reporters in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, said he was “still optimistic” about a ceasefire. “I think we’re on the verge of having an agreement,” he said. “It’s time this war ended … People are continuing to meet. We think we can close the deal, they’ve all said they agree on the principles.”
The Gaza conflict is increasingly spreading to the occupied West Bank, where the IDF has carried out extensive raids in the past week aimed at tracking down Hamas and other militants. On Sunday, three Israeli police officers were shot dead in an attack on their car near the city of Hebron.
Julian Borger is The Guardian‘s world affairs editor based in Washington
Quique Kierszenbaum is a Jerusalem based reporter and photographer
