Israel has recovered the bodies of six hostages who were seized during Hamas’s 7 October attack and taken to Gaza, its military has announced.
An overnight operation in Khan Younis in southern Gaza recovered the bodies of Yagev Buchshtab, Alexander Dancyg, Avraham Munder, Yoram Metzger, Nadav Popplewell and Haim Perry, all civilians abducted from their homes in kibbutzim adjacent to Israel’s barrier wall with the Gaza Strip, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said on Tuesday.
The military did not give details about how or when the men died. Over the past few months, the families of all six had already announced the men had been killed after being briefed on IDF intelligence findings.
Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, praised the recovery effort and said “our hearts ache for the terrible loss”. “The state of Israel will continue to make every effort to return all of our hostages – the living and the deceased,” he said in a statement.
The number and identities of the estimated 120 Israelis that remain in captivity in Gaza, and the sequencing of how they might be released, is one of the key stumbling blocks in ceasefire talks, the latest round of which the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, described on Monday as “maybe the last opportunity” to broker a truce agreement in the 10-month-old conflict.
US officials have been accused of being too optimistic in their claims that negotiators are on the verge of striking a deal. On Monday, Netanyahu’s office put out a rare public statement backing the US’s so-called “bridging proposal”, but large gaps between the sides remain.
Hamas is not directly participating in this round of negotiations and has said the latest proposal on the table hews too closely to Israel’s demands.
Blinken is travelling to Egypt and Qatar on Tuesday for further negotiations after meetings in Israel on Monday. The US diplomat’s trip – his ninth since the war broke out – is part of renewed international efforts to broker a ceasefire after the assassinations of a top Hezbollah commander and Hamas’s political chief, Ismail Haniyeh, in Lebanon and Iran.
A cessation of hostilities in Gaza is considered the best way to cool regional tensions. Tehran and the powerful Lebanese militia have threatened retaliatory action, and Hezbollah, together with other militias in Iran’s “axis of resistance” across Syria, Iraq and Yemen, have said they will stop attacking Israel and US assets in the region when the war in Gaza is brought to an end.
About 250 Israelis and foreigners were taken hostage on 7 October in the Hamas invasion in which about 1,200 people were killed, according to Israeli tallies. At least 40,000 people in Gaza have been killed in Israel’s ensuing retaliatory war on the strip, according to the health ministry in the Hamas-controlled territory.
During a ceasefire in November, 105 Israeli hostages were released in exchange for 240 Palestinian women and children held in Israel’s jails, but broke down after a week.
Since then, at least 43 hostages are believed to have died in captivity, according to official Israeli estimates. That number includes three hostages who were mistakenly shot dead by IDF soldiers in December and one, Sahar Baruch, who was killed in a failed rescue mission.
Hamas has claimed that several hostages died due to Israeli bombings. Last week, it made a rare statement on the deaths of two unidentified male hostages, saying they were shot by their captor contrary to his orders in revenge for the deaths of his children in an Israeli airstrike.
The IDF has rescued seven hostages to date in three raids. A total of 274 people were killed and another 696 were injured in the June operation in Nuseirat refugee camp that freed four hostages, according to Palestinian medics, after the IDF launched airstrikes on the area that allowed the commandos to escape after one of their vehicles broke down.