Israeli military says it is checking reports that Hamas handed over body of Shiri Bibas
Israeli PM Netanyahu says Hamas will pay for not returning Bibas with her 2 children
The Israeli military said on Friday it is checking reports that Hamas has handed the Red Cross a body said to be that of hostage Shiri Bibas, a day after Israel received four bodies of hostages held captive in Gaza that included one unidentified woman.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Israel would make Hamas pay for failing to release Bibas's body 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 on Friday.
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 a Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
The Israeli leader gave no details on a possible 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.
However, 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. Chief military spokesperson Daniel Hagari said the boys were killed by the militants "with their bare hands," but gave no details.
The United Nations Human Rights Office said it had no information of its own on the death of the hostages and called for an effective investigation into the causes of their deaths.
"The return of the remains of the deceased is a basic humanitarian goal," the office said.
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.
Six living hostages are due for release on Saturday in exchange for 602 Palestinian prisoners and detainees, according to Hamas, and the start of negotiations for a second phase of the ceasefire is expected in the coming days.
"Hamas must return the hostages as agreed in the ceasefire — the living and the deceased," Israeli military spokesperson Nadav Shoshani said in a statement on X. "They have to bring Shiri back, and they have to release the six living hostages expected tomorrow."
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 International Committee of 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 military to intensify operations in another Palestinian territory, the Israeli-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.