Blood on the ground of a dark, cramped tunnel sealed by an iron door, bullets and a chess set are seen in a video released by the Israeli military of the passageway deep underground where it said six hostages were held and killed by Hamas.
Prosecutors at the International Criminal Court (ICC) were looking into the reported death of Hamas military leader Mohammed Deif and would withdraw their case against him if they could confirm it, legal filings made public on Tuesday showed.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Tuesday demanded an overhaul of Israeli military conduct in the occupied West Bank as he decried the fatal shooting of a US protester against settlement expansion, which Israel said was accidental.
Israel shares video of tunnel where hostages were killed
Blood on the ground of a dark, cramped tunnel sealed by an iron door, bullets and a chess set are seen in a video released by the Israeli military of the passageway deep underground where it said six hostages were held and killed by Hamas.
The video was filmed by the military last Friday, its spokesperson Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said, as a forensic team investigated the hostage deaths. It was released to the public on Tuesday after it had been viewed by their families and the Israeli security Cabinet.
The six hostages were killed on the night of 29 August, said Hagari. Their bodies were found and retrieved by Israeli soldiers in the southern Gaza area of Rafah around two days later.
Hagari said at least two Hamas gunmen shot them dead in the tunnel, which is 20m below ground, less than 1.7m high and about 80cm wide. It has an exit shaft used by the militants, below a children’s room in a house.
The hostages had probably been held in the dank tunnel, where it is hard to breathe and to stand up straight, for some time, possibly weeks, said Hagari.
A version of the video with English narration shows Kalashnikov rifle magazines, bags containing plastic bottles filled with urine and a bucket in a hole that served as a toilet. Women’s clothing is strewn on the ground. The Hebrew version, broadcast live on Israeli television channels, also shows a chess set.
Reuters was not able to independently verify the location or the date when the video was filmed.
Israeli troops were in the area, fighting Hamas militants above ground when the hostages were killed, Hagari said, adding that the soldiers had not been attempting a rescue operation. The military did not have precise verified intelligence about the hostages’ presence in the area, he said.
The six dead hostages were two women and four men aged between 23 and 40, five of whom were taken from the Nova dance festival attacked by militants on 7 October. One of them was a father whose baby was born after he was taken hostage. The killings have sparked outrage and an outpouring of grief in Israel
Hamas-led fighters took around 250 foreign and Israeli hostages when they burst into Israel on 7 October and killed 1,200 people, according to Israeli tallies. Israel’s offensive in Gaza has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians since.
Around 100 hostages remain in Gaza, at least a third of whom are believed dead. More than 100 hostages were released in return for Palestinian prisoners in November and eight have been rescued by Israeli forces.
ICC prosecutor seeks to confirm death of Hamas leader Deif
Prosecutors at the International Criminal Court (ICC) were looking into the reported death of Hamas military leader Mohammed Deif and would withdraw their case against him if they could confirm it, legal filings made public on Tuesday showed.
Deif (58) was believed to be one of the masterminds of the 7 October assault on southern Israel which triggered the Gaza war, and since then had directed Hamas military operations against Israeli forces in the Palestinian enclave.
Israel said he was killed in an Israeli airstrike on Gaza’s southern city of Khan Younis on July 13. Hamas has neither confirmed nor denied that.
“The prosecution will withdraw its [arrest warrant] application against Deif if sufficient and reliable information confirms his death,” said the legal document, filed under seal on 2 August but only revealed on Tuesday.
Last Friday the ICC announced it had terminated proceedings against Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, who was assassinated in Iran on 31 July.
The ICC is currently weighing a request for arrest warrants against Israeli and Hamas leaders made earlier this year.
In May, ICC chief prosecutor Karim Khan asked for arrest warrants for Haniyeh, Deif and the current head of Hamas, Yahya Sinwar, for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity committed during the 7 October attacks on Israel.
The prosecutor is also seeking warrants for the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his defence minister, Yoav Gallant, for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity during Israel’s Gaza offensive.
“Unfortunately, we have seen from the beginning that the proceedings in The Hague are politically biased and have no professional legal basis whatsoever,” Netanyahu’s office said in a statement on Tuesday.
Blinken decries ‘unjustified’ killing of activist in West Bank
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Tuesday demanded an overhaul of Israeli military conduct in the occupied West Bank as he decried the fatal shooting of a US protester against settlement expansion, which Israel said was accidental.
Aysenur Ezgi Eygi (26), who is also a Turkish national, was shot dead last Friday at a protest march in Beita, a village near Nablus where Palestinians have been repeatedly attacked by far-right Jewish settlers.
Israel’s military said on Tuesday that its initial inquiry found it was highly likely its troops had fired the shot that killed her but that her death was unintentional, and it voiced deep regret.
In his strongest comments to date criticising the security forces of Washington’s closest Middle East ally, Blinken described Eygi’s killing as “unprovoked and unjustified”. He said Washington would insist to the Israeli government that it makes changes to how its forces operate in the West Bank.
“No one should be shot and killed for attending a protest. No one should have to put their life at risk just for freely expressing their views,” he told reporters in London.
“In our judgment, Israeli security forces need to make some fundamental changes in the way that they operate in the West Bank, including changes to their rules of engagement.
“Now we have the second American citizen killed at the hands of Israeli security forces. It’s not acceptable,” he said.
An Israeli government spokesperson declined to comment on Blinken’s remarks.
A surge in violent settler assaults on Palestinians in the West Bank has stirred anger among Western allies of Israel, including the US, which has imposed sanctions on some Israelis involved in the hardline settler movement. Tensions have been heightened amid Israel’s war against Hamas militants in Gaza.
Two Palestinians killed by Israeli forces in West Bank
Israeli security forces killed two people in the West Bank city of Tulkarm on Tuesday, Palestinian health authorities said, as the military returned to the city only days after wrapping up one of their biggest operations in months.
There was no detail on the two Palestinians, a man and a woman, and the Israeli military had no immediate comment on the incident, which added to a series of deadly clashes in the area over the past few weeks.
The armed wings of the Fatah and Islamic Jihad factions issued statements saying their fighters were engaged in gun battles with the Israeli forces.
The official Palestinian news agency Wafa said Israeli troops and military vehicles had surrounded the government hospital in Tulkarm as the operation began.
Dozens killed, wounded in Israeli strikes on Gaza tent camp
Israeli strikes blasted a huge crater in a designated safe zone in southern Gaza before dawn on Tuesday, setting tents ablaze and burying Palestinian families under sand.
Palestinian officials said scores of people had been killed or injured in the strikes, with at least 19 dead bodies brought to hospital and other victims feared lost or buried. Reuters journalists saw several bodies in the morning aftermath. Israel disputed the Palestinian casualty figures.
The Israeli military said it had struck a command centre for Hamas fighters it said had infiltrated the designated “humanitarian” area in al-Mawasi, a vast camp on sandy soil where the military has told hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to shelter since ordering them out of their homes.
Hamas denied any fighters were present.
Rescuers dug with shovels through the night, searching for bodies and survivors buried where the strike had blasted a crater the size of a small football pitch.
Tents in the surrounding area had been incinerated, leaving only metal frames dusted with ghostly ash in a wasteland littered with debris. A car had been completely buried, only its top visible beneath the sand.
In the morning, mourners at a nearby hospital wailed over bodies heaped in white plastic bags or wrapped in bloodstained shrouds.
One of Raed Abu Muammar’s daughters had been killed. His wife and his other daughter had been buried but were pulled out alive. He carried the surviving baby girl.
“I was under the sand as well. I got out and started looking for my daughters and my wife. I saw body parts of the neighbours in my tent — I did not know those were our neighbours’ parts until I saw my family in one piece.
“These are the Israeli targets. Look at them,” he said, gesturing to the baby girl in his arms. “We were in humanitarian areas that were supposed to be safe.”
The Gaza health ministry, which compiles casualty figures, said hospitals had so far received 19 bodies. Other victims were still under sand or on roads that rescuers could not reach, it said.
The Hamas-run Gaza government media office put the number of fatalities at more than 40. It said that at least 60 others were wounded in the strikes and many remained missing.
Residents and medics said the camp was struck by five or six missiles or bombs.
Polio vaccination starts in north Gaza despite obstacles
A campaign to vaccinate a final 200,000 children in north Gaza against polio began on Tuesday although health and aid officials said the operation was complicated by access restrictions, evacuation orders and shortages of fuel.
The campaign in north Gaza, the part of the territory hardest hit by Israel’s 11-month military offensive against Hamas militants, follows the vaccination of more than 446,000 Palestinian children in central and south Gaza earlier this month.
Medical staff had started administering vaccines in the north despite a dire need for fuel, among other challenges, said Dr Moussa Abed of the primary care unit in Gaza’s health ministry.
Vaccination centres were in areas that were militarily very active, difficult to reach and isolated if things went wrong, said Sam Rose, a deputy director of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA.
“There are some nerves, but we’ll have to make it work,” he told Reuters by text message.
On Monday, Israel stopped a convoy that included vehicles and fuel for the vaccination campaign as well as a World Health Organization team trying to get to Gaza’s Al Shifa hospital and the mission had to be aborted, the WHO’s Tarik Jasarevic told reporters in a briefing.
Israel also issued an evacuation order in north Gaza, the first in more than two weeks, that included areas that are part of humanitarian pause zones agreed upon for the polio vaccinations, according to a UN update on Monday.
Israel close to completing Gaza missions, says defence minister
Israeli forces were near to fulfilling their mission in Gaza and their focus would turn to the country’s northern border with Lebanon as daily exchanges of fire with Hezbollah take place, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said on Tuesday
“The centre of gravity is moving northward, we are near to completing our tasks in the south, but our mission here is not yet done,” Gallant told troops on Israel’s northern border in a video sent by his office.
Gallant was attending a ground combat drill, his office said.
“These instructions that you are waiting for here today, I gave in the south and saw the forces operate,” Gallant said referring to Israel’s ground invasion of the Gaza Strip three weeks after the 7 October attack by Hamas that triggered the war.
The Lebanese group Hezbollah began firing rockets into Israel on 8 October and the two sides have been trading fire since, with tens of thousands of civilians displaced on both sides of the border.
Israeli leaders have said they would prefer to resolve the conflict through an agreement that would push Iran-backed Hezbollah away from the border. Hezbollah has said that it will continue fighting Israel as long as the war in Gaza is ongoing.
In separate remarks to journalists on Tuesday, Gallant said: “While we pursue an agreement, I have directed the IDF [Israeli Defence Forces] to prepare for every scenario, including directing our attention to the northern arena. We are committed to changing the security situation on the northern front and to bringing our citizens home safely.”
The Israeli military on Tuesday said it killed a commander in Hezbollah’s elite Radwan force. The group confirmed his death but not his role and said it fired rockets at Israeli army targets across the border in retaliation. DM
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