By Ari Rabinovitch and Nidal al-Mughrabi
JERUSALEM (Reuters) – The Israeli military said on Sunday it had recovered the bodies of six hostages from a tunnel in the southern Gaza Strip where they were apparently killed shortly before Israeli forces reached them.
The Israeli military said it had recovered bodies from underground in the southern city of Rafah, as a polio vaccination campaign began in the war-torn enclave and violence erupted in the occupied West Bank.
The bodies of Carmel Gat, Hirsch Goldberg-Bolin, Eden Yerushalmi, Alexander Lobanov, Almog Sarousi and Uri Danino were returned to Israel, Israeli military spokesman Admiral Daniel Hagari said in a press briefing.
“According to our initial assessments, they were brutally murdered by Hamas terrorists shortly before we reached them,” he said.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is under pressure after nearly 11 months of war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza to reach a deal that includes a ceasefire and the release of the remaining hostages, said Israel would not rest until it could catch those responsible for the attack.
“Those who kill hostages do not want an agreement,” he added.
Senior Hamas officials said Israel was responsible for the deaths because it refused to sign the ceasefire agreement.
“Netanyahu is responsible for killing Israeli prisoners,” senior Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri told Reuters. “Israelis must choose between Netanyahu and the deal.”
The bodies recovered were those of about 250 hostages taken during the surprise Hamas-led incursion into southern Israel that sparked the war in Gaza on October 7 last year.
With their death, 101 Israeli and foreign prisoners remain in Gaza, but it is known that about a third of these have died, while the fate of the others is unknown.
Israeli statistics indicate that about 1,200 Palestinians were killed in the Hamas attack on Gaza. Since then, at least 40,691 Palestinians have been killed and 94,060 others wounded in the Israeli military offensive on Gaza, according to the health ministry in the Strip.
News on Sunday that more hostage bodies have been found is likely to lead to further protests by Israelis demanding a hostage release deal.
The Prisoners’ Families Forum called on Netanyahu to take responsibility and explain what is preventing an agreement.
“They were all killed in the past few days, after surviving nearly 11 months of abuse, torture and starvation in Hamas captivity. The delay in signing the agreement led to their deaths and the deaths of many other hostages,” the statement said.
Hagari said that days ago, the hostage, Qaid Farhan al-Qadi, a member of the Bedouin community in southern Israel, was rescued about a kilometer away.
He added that after locating the judge, the forces were ordered to be cautious because there may be other hostages in the area, but there was no precise information about their location.
“Devastated and angry”
US President Joe Biden, who has been closely following the fate of the six hostages, said they included American-Israeli Goldberg Polin, and that he was “devastated and angry”.
“Hamas leaders will pay the price for these crimes, and we will continue to work around the clock to reach an agreement that will secure the release of the remaining hostages,” he said in a statement.
Goldberg-Pollin, 23, was arrested at a music festival near the Gaza border and appeared in a video released by Hamas in late April.
Earlier, Biden, speaking to reporters in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, said he was “still optimistic” about reaching a ceasefire agreement to end the conflict, adding that “people continue to meet.”
Months of on-and-off negotiations mediated by the United States, Qatar and Egypt have so far failed to secure a ceasefire agreement, despite increasing U.S. pressure for a deal and repeated trips by senior officials to the region.
The two sides agreed to a ceasefire for at least eight hours a day from Sunday to Tuesday to allow the UN World Health Organization and Palestinian doctors to begin vaccinating 640,000 children in Gaza.
The campaign comes after the World Health Organization confirmed last month that a child had been partially paralyzed by poliovirus type 2, the first such case in the region in 25 years.
The war has created a major humanitarian crisis in Gaza, as well as inflaming tensions across the region and in the occupied West Bank, where Israeli officials said Sunday that three Israelis were killed when their car came under fire near the city of Hebron.
Hundreds of Israeli forces have been carrying out raids across the West Bank since Wednesday in one of their largest operations in the area in months, which Israel says is aimed at eliminating Islamist militants.
Hamas praised the attack in the West Bank, but did not claim responsibility, saying it was a “natural response to the massacres and genocide in the Gaza Strip.”