Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed on Sunday to “settle the score” with Hamas after the military had recovered the bodies of six hostages from a Gaza tunnel.
“Those who kill hostages do not want an agreement” for a Gaza truce, Netanyahu said in a statement, telling Hamas leaders that “we will hunt you down, we will catch you and we will settle the score”.
Netanyahu said that Israel was “fighting on all fronts against a cruel enemy who wants to murder us all”, mentioning a shooting attack near the city of Hebron in the occupied West Bank earlier on Sunday that killed three police officers.
Hamas has not claimed the attack but in a statement called it a “heroic operation by the resistance”.
According to Netanyahu, “the fact that Hamas continues to commit atrocities such as those it committed on October 7 obliges us to do everything we can to ensure that it can no longer do so”, referring to the Palestinian group’s unprecedented attack on southern Israel that triggered the ongoing war in the Gaza Strip.
A senior Hamas official said that several of the six hostages found dead had been “approved” for release in the event of a truce deal, which has yet to be finalised despite months of mediation efforts.
“Some of the names of the captives announced as found by the (Israeli) occupier…were part of the list of hostages to be released that Hamas had approved” in a proposed exchange for Palestinian prisoners held in Israel, the official said.
Israeli media reported that US-Israeli hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin and two others whose bodies had been recovered from Gaza — Carmel Gat and Eden Yerushalmi — had been approved by Hamas to be released in the event of a truce deal.
The Hamas official said the six captives were “killed by the occupation’s fire and bombing”, an accusation denied by the Israeli military.
Military spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Nadav Shoshani in an online briefing with journalists that “according to our initial assessment, they were brutally murdered by Hamas terrorists”.
“We do know they were murdered by Hamas terrorists. We do know — I can tell you — there was no real-time fire engagement in the tunnel,” Shoshani said.
Claims by Hamas that the hostages were killed by Israeli forces were “psychological warfare”, he said.
The bodies were found in a tunnel in the southern city of Rafah, around one kilometre away from where troops had rescued alive another hostage, Kaid Farhan Alkadi, on Tuesday, according to Shoshani.