Autopsies of 6 bodies recovered from Gaza reveal bullets, advocacy group for hostage families says
A group representing relatives of hostages taken in the Oct. 7 attack on Israel said Thursday that autopsies showed “bullets were found in the bodies” of six captives Israeli troops recovered from an underground tunnel in the southern Gaza Strip, raising questions about how they died.
The group, the Hostages Family Forum, said the autopsy results indicated that the six hostages “were taken alive and executed in the tunnels of Hamas.”
But an Israeli military spokesperson, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter to families, said Thursday that the autopsies showed “marks suggestive of gunshots” on the bodies and stressed it was too soon to determine whether gunshot wounds were the cause of death.
The autopsy reports have not been made public. The New York Times has not reviewed them and cannot confirm the results.
Four other bodies found in the tunnels near the hostages, believed to belong to Hamas militants, did not display the same marks, the military spokesperson said.
How and when the hostages died has been a matter of contention. Hamas has blamed the deaths on Israeli airstrikes, and the Israeli military has acknowledged some of them likely died while Israel was carrying out military operations in the area where they were found. Some Israel news outlets reported the hostages may have suffocated when the tunnel fill with toxins after an airstrike.
The revelations raise new questions about the circumstances of the hostages’ deaths after months of conflicting statements about some of the recovered captives from Hamas and the Israeli military.
On Tuesday, the Israeli military announced that it had recovered the six bodies in a hidden tunnel network, alongside four of their presumed captors.
Five of the six captives were already believed to be dead, according to the Israeli military. Three of them — Haim Peri, 80; Yoram Metzger, 80; and Alexander Dancyg, 75 — had been abducted from the Nir Oz kibbutz near the Gaza border. Two others — Nadav Popplewell, 51, and Yagev Buchshtab, 35 — were taken from another border community, Nirim.
The sixth body belonged to another resident of Nir Oz, Avraham Munder, 79. Munder’s death had not been established previously.
Abu Ubaida, a spokesperson for Hamas’ military wing, said in March that Metzger and Peri were among seven hostages who had been killed in Israeli airstrikes in Gaza. Hamas then said in May that Popplewell had died from injuries sustained in an Israeli airstrike more than a month earlier.
Weeks later, in early June, the Israeli military’s chief spokesperson, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, said that it was examining the possibility that some of the hostages had been killed together months earlier while Israeli forces were operating in the Khan Younis area.
On Tuesday, Hagari was asked again at a news conference about how the hostages died. He repeated what he had said in June — that the “hostages were killed while our troops were operating in Khan Younis” — and added that a forensic examination would reveal more.
Israeli news media reported Tuesday that initial assessments suggested that five of the six hostages had died from suffocation when an Israeli airstrike hit another tunnel, causing the one they were in to fill with carbon dioxide. The Times could not confirm those reports.
The recovery of six dead hostages this week emphasized the urgent need for a cease-fire deal, families of the captives said in their statement Thursday. The forum said the evidence the hostages may have been shot “serves as further proof of the cruelty of the terrorists,” and it condemned the government’s failure to reach a cease-fire agreement that would lead to the return of all hostages and an end to the fighting in Gaza.
“In every minute that the deal is not completed, another hostage could lose their life,” the forum said. “After 10 1/2 months of war in which the hostages have been suffering, tortured, and dying, it is clear to all that the return of the hostages is only possible through a deal.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
