Israeli military recovers bodies of 6 hostages in Gaza operation

The Israeli military recovered the bodies of six more hostages who were being held captive by Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Tuesday morning. In an overnight operation, the Israel Defense Forces said it recovered the bodies of Yagev Buchshtab, 35; Alexander Dancyg, 76; Avraham Munder, 79; Yoram Metzger, 80; Nadav Popplewell, 51; and Chaim Peri, 80, from the Khan Younis area in southern Gaza. Israeli troops entered Hamas tunnels in Khan Younis to retrieve the bodies, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said Tuesday, calling the operation “complex.” Advertisement “We will continue working to achieve the goals of this war — returning the hostages to Israel and dismantling Hamas,” Gallant said. Israeli troops located a tunnel shaft about 10 meters deep that led to an underground route where the hostages’ bodies were found, the IDF said Tuesday, adding that weapons and explosives were found along the route and “neutralized.” Nadav Shoshani, a spokesman for Israel’s army, said Hamas had used a false wall to hide the bodies of the six hostages inside a tunnel under an area previously designated by Israel as part of a humanitarian area in Khan Younis. “The State of Israel will continue to make every effort to return all of our hostages — the living and the deceased,” he said. Family members of Israeli hostages hold regular protests demanding a deal that would bring hostages home and calling for the ouster of Netanyahu’s government — as the prime minister’s far-right coalition partners push to avoid any deal that would end the fight against Hamas. Advertisement Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who is visiting Israel, Egypt and Qatar this week in an effort to conclude a deal, said Monday that the U.S.-backed cease-fire proposal was “probably the best, maybe the last, opportunity to get the hostages home, to get a cease-fire, and to put everyone on a better path to enduring peace and security.” In a statement Tuesday, the Hostages and Missing Families Forum — an umbrella group representing loved ones of the roughly 250 hostages abducted by Hamas and other armed groups on Oct. 7 — said there were still 109 hostages, alive and dead, in the Gaza Strip, including four people captured before 2023. Advertisement The Israeli prime minister’s office said Tuesday that of the hostages captured on Oct. 7 who remain in Gaza, 34 have been confirmed dead, leaving approximately 71 presumed living. Demonstrators at a protest Tuesday evening in Tel Aviv called on the prime minister to resign and chanted, “hostage deal now” in the streets outside Israel’s Defense Ministry. “Those six were kidnapped alive,” Yehuda Cohen, whose son Nimrod Cohen is being held hostage, said at the hostage families’ protest. “They suffered all the way just to be murdered at the end either by Hamas or the IDF.” Cohen said he is “frightened” over the fate of his son, a 20-year-old Israeli soldier who Cohen believes was taken alive into Gaza by Hamas during the Oct. 7 attack. Advertisement Cohen said that 10½ months of conflict had yielded little results, and accused Israeli officials, including Netanyahu, of hindering progress toward a cease-fire. “We have Hamas as an enemy and we have our government as an enemy.” Gershon Baskin, who helped negotiate the release of captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit from Hamas captivity in 2011, also criticized Netanyahu on Tuesday, saying the retrieval of the six bodies was “not success” but “shameful.” “Shame on those who think that military pressure saves hostages — military pressure kills them,” Baskin said, before calling for an end to the war. According to the hostage families’ group, four of the hostages whose bodies were recovered — Dancyg, Munder, Metzger and Peri — were from Nir Oz, a kibbutz in southern Israel less than two miles from the Gaza border. “He could have been saved but he wasn’t,” Margalit said, adding that if a deal had been secured, his family member might have survived. – This Summarize was created by Neural News AI (V1). Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/08/20/israel-hamas-gaza-war-latest-cease-fire/