(translated from French by PAJU)
Israel’s Channel 12 said the three Israeli captives, Nik Beizer, Ron Sherman and Elia Toledano, were killed in an Israeli airstrike targeting a senior military official of the Palestinian Hamas group in the northern Gaza Strip.
According to the Israeli channel, the Israeli military was unaware that the Israeli captives were with the Hamas leader, but had known the details of their deaths since February and had chosen not to make them public, according to the network.
In mid-December, the military said it had recovered the bodies of three Israelis captured alive by Hamas on October 7 last year from a tunnel.
The Israeli army has previously killed Israeli hostages in its devastating bombardments of the Gaza Strip since October 7.
On December 15, 2023, soldiers operating in Shuja’iyya in Gaza killed three Israeli hostages. The hostages, who were calling for help, were unarmed and bare-chested, waving a white flag when they were killed. The hostages were carrying messages written on white cloth that read: “S.O.S,” “Help,” or “3 hostages.”
Two Israeli hostages were killed in Israeli strikes in Gaza in February, and another died of wounds sustained in an Israeli airstrike in May 2024, according to Hamas.
Israel estimates that more than 100 hostages remain in Hamas’ custody in Gaza, some of whom have already been killed.
The Families of Hostages Blame Netanyahu
The families of the hostages have been demanding an agreement on the release of the hostages for months and accuse Netanyahu and his government of sabotaging any agreement with Hamas.
The Forum of Families of Hostages and the Missing has criticized Netanyahu, holding him responsible for the deaths of the hostages whose bodies were recently recovered. The Israeli army said in early September that it had found the bodies of six people who had been taken hostage on October 7.
“If it had not been for the saboteurs, the excuses and the manipulation, the hostages whose deaths we learned about this morning would probably be alive,” read a statement published by the Forum on ‘X’.
Israel’s ongoing war on the Gaza Strip has killed nearly 41,100 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and injured nearly 94,800 others, according to local health officials.
The blockade of the enclave has led to severe shortages of food, clean water and medicine, leaving much of the region in ruins.
For months, the United States, Qatar and Egypt have been engaged in diplomatic efforts to broker a deal between Israel and Hamas to facilitate a prisoner exchange and establish a ceasefire.
These efforts also aim to get Israel to allow humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip. However, negotiations have stalled, largely because of Netanyahu’s refusal to end the ongoing genocidal war.
(To see the video that accompanies the article click on the link below):
L’armée israélienne aurait tué des otages à Gaza sans en informer le public (trtfrancais.com)
