Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Friday that Israel would make Hamas pay for failing to release the body of hostage Shiri Bibas as agreed.
“We will act with determination to bring Shiri home along with all our hostages — both living and dead — and ensure Hamas pays the full price for this cruel and evil violation of the agreement,” he said in a video statement.
The statement came after Israeli specialists said that one of the four bodies handed over by Hamas on Thursday was an unidentified woman and not Shiri Bibas, whose two sons, Kfir and Ariel were handed over and identified.
Netanyahu accused Hamas of acting “in an unspeakably cynical manner” by placing the body of a Gaza woman in the coffin instead of Shiri Bibas, who was kidnapped along with her two sons and her husband, Yarden, during the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Netanyahu gave no details on a possible Israeli response, but the incident underscored the fragility of the ceasefire agreement reached with U.S. backing and with the help of Qatari and Egyptian mediators last month.
6 hostages to be freed, Hamas says
Ismail Al-Thawabta, director of the Hamas-run Gaza government media office, said Shiri Bibas’s remains appear to have been mixed with other human remains after being buried in the rubble of a building destroyed in an Israeli airstrike.
Hamas said in November 2023 that the children and their mother had been killed in an Israeli airstrike. The Israeli military said intelligence assessments and forensic analysis of the bodies of the Bibas children indicated that they were deliberately killed by their captors.
Israelis came together in Tel Aviv on Thursday as the bodies of four hostages — including two children — were returned to Israel from Gaza, in what one man described as the ‘saddest day’ since the deadly Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas militants.
It is not clear if the mixup will jeopardize the start of negotiations for a second phase of the ceasefire, which was expected in the coming days.
Hamas said it planned to release six hostages, all alive, as originally planned for Saturday.
The armed wing of militant group Hamas said it will release Israeli hostages Eliya Cohen, Omer Shem Tov, Tal Shoham, Omer Wenkert, Hisham al-Sayed and Avera Mengisto on Saturday.
Hisham al-Sayed and Avera Mengisto are civilians, who entered Gaza a decade ago and have been held there since.
Red Cross, hostage families group condemn mixup
The Red Cross told Reuters on Friday it was “concerned and unsatisfied” by the way Hamas hostage release operations had taken place.
“The ICRC does not participate in sorting, screening, or examining the deceased — this is the responsibility of the parties to the conflict,” it said in a statement on Friday, while expressing concern that the releases had not been conducted privately and in a dignified manner.
The failure to return Shiri Bibas, and the staged public handover of the four coffins on Thursday caused outrage in Israel.
“It’s like they make a joke of us,” said 75-year-old Ilana Caspi. “We are so in grief and this is even more. It’s like you make a punch again, another one and another one. It’s really terrible.”
One of the main groups representing hostage families said they were “horrified and devastated” by the news that Shiri Bibas’s body had not been returned, but called for the ceasefire to continue to bring back all of the 70 hostages still in Gaza.
“Save them from this nightmare,” the Hostages and Missing Families Forum said in a statement.
As the tension over the Gaza ceasefire rose, Netanyahu ordered the Israeli military to intensify operations in another Palestinian territory, the occupied West Bank, after a number of explosions blew up buses standing empty in their depots near Tel Aviv.
No casualties were reported but the explosions were a reminder of the campaign of suicide attacks on public transport that killed hundreds of Israeli civilians during the Second Intifada in the early 2000s.
