Israel recovers three dead hostages from Gaza

The Israeli military says it has recovered the dead bodies of three Israeli hostages from the Gaza Strip based on intelligence from interrogating militants.

German tattoo artist named Shani Louk, 30, was in Israel to attend a peace rave when she was kidnapped and killed on October 7.

The Israeli military said it had recovered the dead bodies of three Israeli hostages from the Gaza Strip based on intelligence from interrogating militants, renewing the focus on the hostage issue as Israel’s leadership presses a military offensive in the southern Gazan town of Rafah.

The three hostages – Amit Buskila, 28, Shani Louk, 23, and Itzik Gelernter, 57 – were kidnapped from a music festival on Oct. 7 and recovered Thursday night in a special operation.

The military didn’t specify the location in which they were found, although it said they were killed on October 7 while the three tried to escape from the Nova music festival near the Gaza border, which was overrun with Hamas militants.

Some 125 of the over 240 hostages taken on Oct. 7 remain in Gaza, according to Israel.

The latest hostage operation shows how challenging it is for Israeli authorities to recover the hostages and comes as negotiations with Hamas, mediated by Egypt, Qatar and the U.S., have fizzled. U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan will travel to Saudi Arabia on Saturday to meet with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, then go to Israel on Sunday to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said Sullivan’s talks with Israelis will include stalled efforts to reach a hostage deal. He will also press Israelis to take a more targeted approach against Hamas.

In the past two weeks, the Israeli military has sent its tanks and ground troops into Rafah, which it says is Hamas’s last stronghold and where some hostages are being held.

There have been two successful rescue operations by the Israeli military to recover a total of three hostages alive so far in the war. Recovering hostages as well as destroying Hamas are two goals Israel has said it seeks to achieve in the war in Gaza.

In response to Israel’s announcement, Hamas said that it would only allow Israel to retrieve hostages dead or through an exchange deal.

The Hostages Families Forum, an advocacy group for families with loved ones held in Gaza, said that the return of the bodies was a reminder that all hostages must be brought back quickly.

The hostage issue has brought more and more Israeli demonstrators out into the streets in recent weeks, and comes amid building frustration in the right-wing community about Israel allowing aid into Gaza.

Small groups of Israeli protesters have attacked a number of aid trucks headed to Gaza from the West Bank and Israel in recent weeks, complicating efforts by the international community to help the strip’s population of more than two million survive the continuing conflict.

Humanitarian workers have warned that getting more aid into the strip is critical, as most of the population have been forced to leave their homes, and some are on the verge of famine. Aid trucks remain the most efficient way to get aid to Gazans, meaning that maintaining safe and secure land routes is essential.

Some right-wing Israeli groups have organized protests against the delivery of humanitarian aid into the strip throughout the war, including at a southern border crossing with Israel where trucks enter Gaza. But more recent protests have turned violent, with instances of truck drivers getting attacked, goods being destroyed, and vehicles being set on fire.

Mohsen Shahin, a 61-year-old truck driver, said Israeli settlers who thought he was delivering aid to Gaza attacked his truck on Wednesday evening. Shahin said he was actually trying to deliver commercial sugar from Nablus to Hebron city in the West Bank. He had stopped at a traffic light when the men, some armed and masked, lit tires in the road on fire in order to block his vehicle from moving forward. Someone threw a rock through his window that hit him in the head, he said. He said soldiers tried to tell the men he wasn’t headed to Gaza but one settler responded by yelling, “He is going to deliver to Hamas.” Such incidents show how resentment has built inside right-wing and more religious settler communities in the occupied West Bank toward Israeli authorities for allowing aid deliveries into the strip for Palestinian civilians when hostages are still held there by Hamas and other militant groups.

Many who oppose the aid say they believe it goes to Hamas rather than to civilians in Gaza. Israeli authorities have said aid and fuel supplied to Gaza has fallen into Hamas’s hands, while United Nations aid officials say the goods go to Palestinian civilians. The U.S. has said it has seen no evidence to support Israeli claims that aid goes to Hamas.

The Israeli military said it received a report Thursday night that dozens of Israeli citizens had attacked an Israeli driver who was wounded and whose truck was set on fire at the Kochav HaShachar junction in the West Bank. It said that three military officers and soldiers were then injured as the military intervened.

In an incident near the Tarqumiyah checkpoint in the West Bank on Monday, protesters unloaded boxes of goods from a truck and threw them on the ground, according to footage by Reuters. Around 70 Palestinian commercial trucks headed toward Gaza were targeted, according to the Hebron Food Trade Association.

Footage captured by Reuters on Tuesday night showed firefighters spraying trucks engulfed in flames near a checkpoint in the southern West Bank town of Beit Awwa. It wasn’t clear whether the trucks were part of the convoy that was attacked a day earlier.

One of the Israeli groups involved in blocking aid trucks is Tzav 9, which has advertised protests via WhatsApp groups, word-of-mouth and Facebook, according to participant Michael Raskas. The Israeli commodities consultant said the rationale behind the demonstrations is the protesters’ belief that Hamas is getting hold of incoming aid.

“To provide aid to our cruel, barbaric enemy in the middle of a war is outrageous. No one is doing anything for our hostages,” he said.

Raskas said demonstrators who have shown up recently come from across the political spectrum and include Israeli settlers. But he said the group’s demonstrations have been peaceful and have only delayed trucks for a few hours at a time.

Earlier this week, Sullivan said the U.S. was looking into how to respond to the aid-convoy attacks, and was raising its concerns with Israeli officials. “It is a total outrage that there are people who are attacking and looting these convoys coming from Jordan going to Gaza to deliver humanitarian assistance,” he said.

The Jordanian government said that two Jordanian convoys carrying food, flour and aid were attacked by Israeli settlers on May 1 and 7, although both made their way into Gaza eventually. The country’s foreign minister said the Israeli government was “fully responsible.” The attacks come as Israeli authorities have severely curtailed humanitarian aid and fuel going into Gaza through Rafah at the same time as the Israeli military has begun to send in its tanks and ground troops. Israel says Rafah is the last stronghold for Hamas and that hostages are being held there.

Only a few hundred thousand liters of fuel have been allowed to enter the Kerem Shalom crossing that borders Israel in the past two weeks, falling short of the roughly 200,000 liters that the U.N. says it needs each day to keep minimal operations afloat. The Rafah border crossing has remained closed after the Israeli military took over the Gaza side last week.

Trucks carrying the first shipment of aid from a temporary pier built by the U.S. military entered the strip on Friday, according to U.S. Central Command, which oversees American military operations in the Middle East.

Air Force Gen. CQ Brown, Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Thursday that the plan is to start with 25 trucks a day and that the aid would be donated by several countries and humanitarian organizations.

Sonali Korde, assistant to the administrator of USAID’s Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance, said Thursday that the first shipments through the pier would include food bars for 11,000 people, therapeutics for children suffering from severe malnutrition and hygiene kits for 30,000 people.

More than 35,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since the start of the war, most of them civilians, Palestinian officials have said, without specifying how many were combatants. Hamas-led militants on Oct. 7 killed some 1,200 Israelis, most of them civilians, according to Israeli authorities.

Hebron Food Trade Association head Waseem Al-Jabari said that in the Tarqumiyah crossing incident, Israeli settlers attacked the convoy after an inspection and goods were being transferred to trucks with Israeli license plates. He said Israeli soldiers standing nearby didn’t intervene.

“They destroyed all the goods, assaulted the drivers, and even sabotaged the trucks by burning them and putting sand in the fuel tanks,” he said of the demonstrators. Now, “the drivers are terrified.” Israeli demonstrators have also attacked the headquarters of the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees in Jerusalem. Philippe Lazzarini, commissioner-general of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, said on X Israeli children and young people attempted to set fire to the building on Tuesday night, the second incident in a week.

The Israeli police didn’t respond to requests for comment about the attacks on aid convoys and Unrwa.

– Fatima AbdulKarim and Sabrina Siddiqui contributed to this article.

The Wall Street Journal