By Maytaal Angel
JERUSALEM (Reuters) -Israel retrieved the bodies of six hostages from the Gaza Strip, the military said on Tuesday, as negotiations continued in an effort to bring back more than 100 captives who remain in the besieged Palestinian enclave.
A total of 109 hostages are believed to remain in Gaza, around a third of whom are thought to be dead, with the fate of the others unknown. Most of them were seized by gunmen from the Palestinian militant group Hamas as they rampaged through communities in southern Israel on Oct. 7, killing some 1,200 Israelis and foreigners and abducting around 250 as hostages.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken met officials in Egypt on Tuesday during a regional trip aimed at bridging Israel-Hamas differences over a deal to end the fighting in Gaza and secure the return of the hostages.
Zahiro Shahar Mor, the nephew of hostage Abraham Munder, one of the six whose body was returned, said Israeli authorities had “torpedoed” opportunities to sign a ceasefire deal and bring the hostages back alive.
“My uncle was a war hero who lived his whole life building the country. Hamas took him but the continuous abandonment is on the hands of the Israeli government,” he told Reuters.
“I will not stop fighting for them to get (back) the people that are still alive. Otherwise, there is no future for the state of Israel. No one will want to live in a state that does not take care of its citizens, that betrays them and abandons them.”
Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said the bodies of Yagev Buchshtab, Alexander Dancyg, Abraham Munder, Yoram Metzger, Nadav Popplewell and Chaim Peri were recovered by Israeli soldiers from tunnels under the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis after a “complex operation”.
“We will continue working to achieve the goals of this war – returning the hostages to Israel and dismantling Hamas,” he said in a statement.
Israel’s chief military spokesman, Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, said in a news conference he was determined to bring home all the hostages – those alive to rehabilitate and those dead to bury.
“We will not give up on any of them,” he said, adding it was a moral obligation to bring them back to Israel. “But we will not be able to bring back all of them in rescue operations.”
Hagari declined to say how many hostages were still alive. When asked whether the hostages had been killed inadvertently by Israeli fire, he said army forces were operating nearby and that they would investigate precise circumstances of their deaths.
The IDF said its forces located a tunnel shaft about 10 meters (32.81 feet) deep leading to an underground tunnel route where the hostages’ bodies were found.
Lieutenant Colonel Nadav Shoshani, an Israeli military spokesperson, said the bodies had been found hidden behind a false wall in a tunnel under an area previously designated as a humanitarian area in Khan Younis.
He said troops had not yet completed their operations in the area.
Like Munder’s nephew, the Hostages Families Forum, an organisation that represents most hostage families, renewed its call on the government to conclude a hostage release deal with Hamas as a matter of urgency.
“The immediate return of the remaining 109 hostages can only be achieved through a negotiated deal. The Israeli government, with the assistance of mediators, must do everything in its power to finalise the deal currently on the table,” it said.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has faced heavy criticism from many of the hostage families for failing to secure a deal, said the government would keep working to bring back the hostages still left in Gaza.
“The state of Israel will continue to make every effort to return all our hostages – the living and the dead,” he said in a statement.
Apart from the hostages seized on Oct. 7, Hamas already had been holding two Israeli citizens who entered Gaza around a decade ago and the bodies of two soldiers killed in 2014.
Since Oct. 7, Israel’s military has levelled swathes of the Palestinian enclave, driving nearly all of its 2.3 million people from their homes and killing at least 40,000, according to Palestinian health authorities. Israel says it has killed some 17,000 militants since the start of the war.
(Reporting by Maytaal Angel, Maayan Lubell and Steven Scheer; Editing by Alex Richardson, Angus MacSwan and Richard Chang)