Hamas released a body on Friday it claimed to be that of Israeli hostage Shiri Bibas, whose misidentification in a handover this week threatened to derail the fragile Gaza ceasefire deal.
Israeli medical authorities said forensic teams were preparing to examine the body, which Hamas transferred via the Red Cross, and confirm its identity.
The Palestinian militant group had agreed to hand over the bodies of Shiri Bibas and her two young sons Kfir and Ariel along with the remains of a fourth hostage on Thursday under the ceasefire that has halted fighting in Gaza since last month.
Four bodies were delivered and the identities of the Bibas boys and the other hostage, Oded Lifshitz, were confirmed.
But Israeli specialists said the fourth body was that of an unidentified woman and not Shiri Bibas, who was kidnapped along with her sons and her husband, Yarden, during the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7th, 2023. Yarden Bibas was released earlier this month.
Basem Naim, a member of the Hamas political bureau, said “unfortunate mistakes” could occur, especially as Israeli bombing had mixed the bodies of Israeli hostages and Palestinians, thousands of whom were still buried in the rubble.
“We confirm that it is not in our values or our interest to keep any bodies or not to abide by the covenants and agreements that we sign,” he said in a statement.
The failure to hand over the correct body and the staged public handover of the four coffins on Thursday caused outrage in Israel and drew a threat of retaliation from Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who accused Hamas of breaching the ceasefire agreement.
“The cruelty of Hamas monsters knows no bounds,” said Mr Netanyahu on Friday following an investigation by Israel’s forensic medicine institute. “We will ensure that Hamas pays the full price for this cruel and malicious violation of the agreement,” he said.
Hamas sources claimed the organisation was surprised by the findings of the Israeli forensic examination and insisted it has no interest in disrupting the deal. They emphasised that Bibas and the children were held by another group and Hamas had no access to where the bodies were kept.
A statement from Kibbutz Nir Oz, home of the Bibas family, said the community adheres to the “clear demands of the Bibas family at this time: release, not revenge”.
Hamas said in November 2023 that the children and their mother had been killed in an Israeli air strike. Ismail Al-Thawabta, director of the Hamas-run Gaza government media office, said Mr Netanyahu “bears full responsibility for killing her and her children”.
Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesman Daniel Hagari said on Friday that four-year-old Ariel and 10-month-old Kfir were “murdered by terrorists” early in the war.
According to Mr Hagari, the two were not killed by gunshots but by the “terrorists’ bare hands” and, after their deaths, “horrific actions were carried out to obscure the atrocities committed”.
He said the findings are supported by intelligence gathered by the IDF and information drawn from the bodies’ autopsies conducted at Israel’s Institute of Forensic Medicine.
The UN Human Rights Office said it had no information of its own on the hostage deaths and called for an effective investigation into the causes. “The return of the remains of the deceased is a basic humanitarian goal,” the office said.
Any Israeli response to the incident will happen only after Saturday morning’s scheduled release of the remaining six living hostages under the first stage of the ceasefire deal. Four of the hostages were seized during the October 7th, 2023 attack on southern Israel, while two had mental health problems and crossed into Gaza of their own volition; they have been held by Hamas for a decade.
Hamas has said Israel will release 602 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for the six Israeli hostages, including 50 serving life sentences and 60 serving long-term sentences. It added that 47 prisoners released in return for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in 2011 but subsequently rearrested will also be set free. Some 445 detainees arrested in Gaza during the current war will also be released.
Meanwhile, Israeli officials said it was a miracle that no one was hurt when three bombs exploded in buses on Thursday night in the Tel Aviv suburb of Bat Yam. An additional device was found before it detonated in the nearby city of Holon.
Police believe the bombs were set to explode at 9pm instead of 9am Friday during the morning rush hour.
The word Tulkarem was written in Arabic on one of the devices, in a reference to one of the areas in the occupied West Bank where the Israeli military has been operating against militants over the last few weeks.
The IDF transferred three extra battalions to the occupied West Bank in response to the bombings. – Additional reporting: Reuters
