An Israeli soldier, with a blue mask pulled down to his chin, celebrates in a video posted on social media the operation in which he has just participated. In images that have raised a great deal of dust and cost him his job, he raises his fist in triumph and spreads his five fingers, looking at the lens of his mobile phone. The soldier is travelling on board an armoured vehicle and on the ground, next to it, he shows five black plastic bags with the bodies that he and his colleagues have just recovered in Gaza and that they are transporting to Israeli territory. These are the bodies of five of the victims of the Hamas attack on 7 October that the fundamentalists had taken to the Strip. But the mission was still secret when the video came to light. The Armed Forces had not even secured the identities nor had the families been informed, according to the local press.
At the same time that the rescue operation was taking place on Wednesday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was addressing the US Congress in a speech that has again raised eyebrows in the forum of hostage families, which is keeping the pressure on the government. Some of them joined the official trip that the president is making these days to the United States and were an important part of his speech. Of the 251 hostages taken by the attackers, 115 remain in Gaza, of whom 41 have been reported dead. Delegations from Hamas and Israel, with Qatar, Egypt and the United States as mediators, have been trying for months to agree on a truce that will allow the hostages to be released.
The return of the five bodies has not appeased the pressure from the hostages’ relatives against the authorities, especially Netanyahu, whom they blame for preventing the agreement for a truce in Gaza. “This slowness is a deliberate sabotage of the opportunity to bring back our loved ones. In fact, it undermines the negotiations and indicates a serious moral failure,” said the forum that brings together most of the relatives and former hostages in a statement. “The heads of the security services are personally and directly responsible for the return of the hostages. It is their duty to uphold Israel’s supreme moral imperative and to provide honest information to the Israelis about who is obstructing the agreement and why,” the statement added.
The five bodies recovered belong to a woman, Maya Goren, 56, who worked in the nursery of Kibbutz Nir Oz, where she was that morning when she was taken away seriously wounded by the attackers, and four soldiers: Ravid Katz, 51; Oren Goldin, 33; Kiril Brodski, 19, and Tomer Yaakov Ahimas, 20, who died while confronting the attackers. The five had already been presumed dead and their bodies have now been located thanks to the secret services in a tunnel in Khan Yunis, in the south of the Palestinian enclave. This town, the second largest in the Strip, is now one of the centres of operations for the Israeli occupation troops, which have forced the displacement of some 150,000 people this week.
“Recovering the hostages, alive or not, this is the mission of our lives,” a member of the Shin Bet (internal secret services) who participated in the rescue wrote alongside a photo of the operation posted on Instagram, reports Haaretz. This newspaper adds that the interrogations of Palestinian detainees have helped carry out the operation of the military and the secret services, although only a posteriori It was possible to find out which bodies were in the tunnel.
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But shortly after publicly confirming the identities of all of them, the army also announced that the reservist featured in the 18-second video has been arrested, held for ten days and permanently dismissed from the reserves for violating “values” and “orders” during a mission requiring confidentiality. There have been cases where the army has recovered bodies in the Strip which, after being transferred to the coroner, were confirmed to be Palestinians.
Netanyahu told the US Congress that he would not rest until he brought everyone back. He did so in a climate of tension with dozens of Democratic congressmen absent and thousands of pro-Palestinian protesters around the Capitol. The prime minister’s detractors see his handling of the war as an attempt to save his job or political legacy. US President Joe Biden himself suggested earlier this month in an interview that it was reasonable to believe that he is delaying the end of the war in Gaza for political reasons.
Maya Goren’s family has issued a statement saying that she and her husband, Avner Goren, who was also killed on 7 October, were abandoned by the authorities, who were unable to prevent the Hamas carnage. They thank the security forces for rescuing the body, while demanding that everyone else, the living and the dead, return home: “We will not stop fighting for everyone’s return.” The statement also says: “Mom has finally been buried. After more than nine months, her journey is over. Your abandonment is finally over, and you have found eternal peace at the side of your beloved, at the side of Dad, who was also abandoned and killed that same day.”
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