By Ari Rabinovitch and Nidal al-Mughrabi
JERUSALEM (Reuters) -Israel recovered the bodies of six hostages from a tunnel in southern Gaza where they were apparently killed not long before Israeli troops reached them, the military said on Sunday.
The Israeli military announced the recovery of the bodies from underground in the southern city of Rafah as a polio vaccination campaign began in the war-shattered territory and violence flared in the occupied West Bank.
The bodies of Carmel Gat, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Eden Yerushalmi, Alexander Lobanov, Almog Sarusi and Ori Danino have been returned to Israel, military spokesperson Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari told reporters in a briefing.
“According to our initial estimation, they were brutally murdered by Hamas terrorists a short time before we reached them,” he said.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, 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 remaining hostages, said Israel would not rest until it caught those responsible.
“Whoever murders hostages – does not want a deal,” he said.
Senior Hamas officials said that Israel, in its refusal to sign a ceasefire agreement, was to blame for the deaths.
“Netanyahu is responsible for the killing of Israeli prisoners,” senior Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri told Reuters. “The Israelis should choose between Netanyahu and the deal.”
The recovered bodies were from about 250 hostages captured during the Hamas-led shock incursion into southern Israel that sparked the war in Gaza on Oct. 7 last year.
Their deaths leaves 101 Israeli and foreign captives still in Gaza, but around a third of these are known to have died, with the fate of others unknown.
About 1,200 people were killed in the Hamas assault, according to Israeli tallies. Since then, at least 40,691 Palestinians have been killed and 94,060 injured in Israel’s military offensive in Gaza, the enclave’s health ministry says.
Sunday’s news that more hostage bodies had been recovered was likely to spur further protests by Israelis demanding a hostage release deal.
The Hostage Families Forum called on Netanyahu to take responsibility and explain what was holding up an agreement.
“They were all murdered in the last few days, after surviving almost 11 months of abuse, torture, and starvation in Hamas captivity. The delay in signing the deal has led to their deaths and those of many other hostages,” it said.
Israel’s Hagari said that days earlier, hostage Qaid Farhan Alkadi, a member of the Bedouin community in southern Israel, was rescued about a kilometre away.
After Alkadi was located, troops were told to be cautious because other hostages might be in the area, but there had been no precise information on their location, he said.
‘DEVASTATED AND OUTRAGED’
U.S. President Joe Biden, who has closely followed the fate of the hostages, said the six included Israeli American Goldberg-Polin and that he was “devastated and outraged”.
“Hamas leaders will pay for these crimes. And we will keep working around the clock for a deal to secure the release of the remaining hostages,” he said in a statement.
Goldberg-Polin, 23, was captured at a music festival near the Gaza border and appeared in a video released by Hamas in late April.
Earlier, speaking to reporters in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, Biden said he was “still optimistic” about a ceasefire deal to stop the conflict, adding that “people are continuing to meet.”
Months of stop-start negotiations mediated by the United States, Qatar and Egypt have so far failed to secure a ceasefire agreement, despite increased U.S. pressure for a deal and repeated trips by top officials to the region.
The two sides have agreed to pause fighting for at least eight-hours daily from Sunday to Tuesday to allow the U.N. World Health Organization (WHO) and Palestinian medics to begin to vaccinate 640,000 children in Gaza.
The campaign comes after the WHO confirmed last month that a baby was partially paralysed by the type 2 polio virus, the first such case in the territory in 25 years.
The war has created a major humanitarian crisis in Gaza, as well as fuelling tensions across the region and in the occupied West Bank, where Israeli officials said on Sunday that three Israelis had been killed when their vehicle came under fire near the city of Hebron.
Hundreds of Israeli troops have been carrying out raids across the West Bank since Wednesday in one of their largest actions in the area in months, which Israel says is aimed at rooting out Islamist militants.
Hamas praised the West Bank attack, but did not claim responsibility for it, saying it was a “natural response to the massacres and genocide in the Gaza Strip”.
(Reporting by Ari Rabinovitch in Jerusalem and Stephanie Kelly in Rehoboth Beach; James Mackenzie in Jerusalem and Nidal al-Mughrabi in Cairo; Writing by Aidan Lewis; Editing by Sharon Singleton)
