Hamas displayed four coffins with the bodies of the dead hostages on a stage in Khan Younis before handing them over to the Red Cross , footage broadcast by Al Jazeera showed. On the same stage, photos of the victims were displayed with Netanyahu depicted above them as a bloodthirsty vampire. The caption read: "The war criminal murdered them with missiles from fighter jets."
The bodies were handed over this morning to the Red Cross, which in turn handed them over to the IDF. They are the little Bibas brothers, national symbols of this ordeal torn from their family at 9 months and 2 years old, their mother, and 86-year-old Oded Lifshitz , who was captured in a kibbutz on the border. The armed and masked Hamas militiamen lined up in a row at the point planned for the handover of the bodies of four hostages. Hundreds of residents gathered on the spot, including women and children, among Palestinian and Hamas flags, as can be seen in the images. The Israeli media did not re-broadcast the live images broadcast by Al Jazeera out of respect for the deceased.
The Prime Minister's Office announced that "Israel has received the coffins of four fallen hostages from the Red Cross. The coffins were transferred to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and the State Security Service (Shin Bet) within the Gaza Strip area, from where they will be transferred to Israel's National Center for Forensic Medicine under the Ministry of Health . An official communication will be sent to the families upon completion of the identification process. The families of the hostages have been updated and our hearts are with them at this difficult time. The public is asked to respect the families' privacy and to refrain from spreading rumors and unofficial and unverified information."
As for the living hostages, Hamas will release on Saturday the last six of the 33 from the first phase of the agreement : Tal Shoham, Omer Shem-Tov, Eliya Cohen, Omer Wenkert, Avera Mengistu and Hisham al-Sayed. The first four were kidnapped on October 7, the other two have been held captive in Gaza for over a decade. The Palestinian faction has also said it is ready to take a further and significant step forward. The new offer is to free all the other kidnapped people in a single exchange during a later phase of the ceasefire .
According to estimates, 19 soldiers and 24 other hostages are still alive, plus around thirty who are believed to have died .
(Unioneonline/L)
