Hamas has handed over the bodies of an Israeli woman, her two young children and an elderly man who were taken captive during the October 2023 attack on southern Israel.
Hamas staged a public handover ceremony in Khan Younis, southern Gaza on Thursday, displaying four coffins on a stage in front of a poster depicting the likeness of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with fangs and blood on his face.
Masked Hamas fighters then carried the coffins from the stage and handed them over to the Red Cross.
United Nations rights chief Volker Turk slammed the spectacle as cruel and contrary to international law.
“Under international law, any handover of the remains of deceased must comply with the prohibition of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, ensuring respect for the dignity of the deceased and their families,” he said.
Red Cross staff held up white screens in an attempt to conceal the coffins from the gaze of the large crowds as they were loaded into their vehicles.
“These operations should be done privately out of the utmost respect for the deceased and for those left grieving,” the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said in a statement.
Youngest captive
The bodies that were handed over included Israeli infant Kfir Bibas, his four-year-old brother Ariel, their mother Shiri Bibas, and a fourth captive, 83-year-old Oded Lifschitz.
The Bibas brothers, the youngest captives taken on October 7, have become symbols of national anguish for many Israelis. Hamas has maintained that they were killed in an Israeli air strike during the war, during which Israeli forces were responsible for the deaths of numerous captives held by Palestinian armed groups.
“Agony. Pain. There are no words. Our hearts — the hearts of an entire nation — lie in tatters,” said Israeli President Isaac Herzog.
A Hamas spokesman said all four were alive before the “Zionist occupation aircraft deliberately bombed the locations where they were being held”.
Hamas said in a statement it “preserved the lives of the occupation prisoners”, provided them with what it could, and “treated them humanely, but their [Israel’s] army killed them along with their captors”.
“Criminal Netanyahu is crying today over the bodies of his prisoners who returned to him in coffins, in a blatant attempt to evade responsibility for their killing in front of his audience,” Hamas said.
While addressing the families of the killed Israeli captives, it said: “We would have preferred your sons to return to you alive, but your army and government leaders chose to kill them instead of bringing them back.”
Throughout the war, Israeli press reports stated that Netanyahu had worked to scuttle ceasefire efforts that would have included the release of captives held in Gaza.
The handover marks the first return of the bodies of captives under the ceasefire agreement between Hamas and Israel that took effect last month and will also see hundreds of Palestinians released from Israeli jails, where allegations of abuse and torture are widespread and where many have been kept in detention without any charge or trial.
A Palestinian group said Israel is withholding the remains of at least 665 Palestinians, including several killed in the 1960s and 1970s.
Al Jazeera’s Tareq Abu Azzoum, reporting from the site of the handover in Khan Younis, said “the site is symbolic for Palestinians because it was a central site for Israeli ground forces during the military operations in the city.
“Preparations started in the early hours of the morning. There are masked fighters with green bands on their heads, armed with rifles and holding different signs with slogans,” he added. “The stage was well-prepared with three main banners. One of them talks about the crimes committed by the Israeli forces during their operations in Gaza.”
‘Very sad day’
In a statement released through a group that represents family members of those taken captive on October 7, Lifschitz’s family said that they received “with deep sorrow the official and bitter news confirming the identification of our beloved Oded’s body”.
Akiva Eldar, an Israeli author and political analyst, said the return of the bodies marks a “very sad day for all of us”.
“These babies became the symbol of I would say Israeli stupidity, fool attitude of the Israeli government,” Eldar told Al Jazeera from Tel Aviv.
He said Netanyahu is well aware of the poor conditions of the Israeli captives.
“But he has other priorities,” said Eldar. “It’s kind of a race between the families who are hoping to see their loved ones back home, and Netanyahu, who is desiring to keep his government as long as he can and to buy more time and buy the support of the people on the radical right that believe that land is more precious than the lives of people.”
Following the handover, the remains were taken into Israel and transported in a convoy to Tel Aviv.
Israel’s military said the bodies would “undergo an identification procedure” at the city’s national forensic medicine institute, where onlookers wept as the convoy arrived.
Only after identification will there be a formal announcement of their deaths and a funeral.
Thursday’s handover of bodies will be followed by the return of six living captives on Saturday, in exchange for hundreds more Palestinians, expected to be women and minors detained by Israeli forces in Gaza during the war.
Under the ceasefire deal, Hamas agreed to release 33 captives in exchange for nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners and detainees in the first phase of an agreement intended to pave the way towards ending the war.
So far, 19 Israeli captives have been released, as well as five Thais who were returned in an unscheduled handover.
Negotiations for a second phase, expected to cover the return of about 60 remaining captives, less than half of whom are believed to be alive, and a full withdrawal of Israeli troops from the Gaza Strip to allow an end to the war, are expected to begin in the coming days.
Israel’s genocide in Gaza has killed more than 48,000 Palestinians, with thousands more bodies believed to remain under the rubble of the bombed-out, besieged enclave.
