FIVE Israeli hostages killed in Hamas captivity were recovered from an underground tunnel network in the northern Gaza Strip, the military said on Sunday, showing footage of a white-tiled bathroom and work room linked by dark concrete-lined passages.
The publication left open the question of how they had died, with chief military spokesperson Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari saying post-mortems were pending. “We will brief the families and then, depending on what they approve, the public,” he said.
The three soldiers and two civilians were among 240 people dragged back to the Gaza Strip by Hamas gunmen during the cross-border rampage of Oct. 7 that sparked the war. The military announced the repatriation of their bodies earlier this month.
Hamas last week published video showing three of the hostages alive in what appeared to be a narrow, white-tiled and windowless bedroom with an electric wall socket.
In a Hebrew chyron directed at Israel, the Iranian-backed Islamist group said: “Your military weapons killed the three.”
The Israel Defense Forces revealed Sunday that it found a large Hamas tunnel network beneath the Jabaliya refugee camp near Gaza City, where the bodies of five Israeli hostages were recovered earlier this month.
The latest revelation regarding Gaza’s web of subterranean hiding spots and fortifications came as the military said it had completed the dismantling of the terror group’s underground command center in the northern Strip, with fighting shifting southward 79 days into a punishing offensive sparked by Hamas’s brutal October 7 assault on southern Israel.
Some 1,200 people in Israel, most of them civilians, were massacred by thousands of armed terrorists who rampaged through Israeli communities that day. Another approximately 240 people were kidnapped, including women, children and the elderly.
The IDF said troops had been deployed to probe a possible tunnel located under Jabaliya earlier this month, eventually finding and recovering the remains of three soldiers and two civilians.
