The Israeli military said Sunday that it had identified the bodies of six hostages discovered in a tunnel in the southern Gaza Strip, including a US-Israeli and a Russian-Israeli.
Their remains were recovered Saturday “from an underground tunnel in the Rafah area” and returned to Israel where they were formally identified, the military said.
It said the dead hostages were Carmel Gat, Eden Yerushalmi, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Alexander Lobanov, Almog Sarusi and Ori Danino, who were all seized by Palestinian militants during Hamas’s October 7 attack on southern Israel that triggered the ongoing war.
Gat was taken from the southern Israeli kibbutz community of Beeri, while the remaining five, ages 23 to 32, were abducted from a music festival near the Gaza border. They were among 251 people taken hostage during the October 7 attack, 97 of whom remain captive in Gaza including 33 the Israeli army says are dead.
Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said the six hostages whose remains had been retrieved were alive when taken captive, and military spokesman Daniel Hagari said “they were brutally murdered by Hamas terrorists shortly before we reached them”.
They include four men and two women, and two with dual citizenship, Russian-Israeli Lobanov and Goldberg-Polin, who is also a US national and was seen alive in a video released by his captors in April.
The Hamas attack resulted in the deaths of 1,205 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli official figures.
Israel’s offensive has killed at least 40,691 people in Gaza, according to the territory’s health ministry. The UN rights office says most of the dead are women and children.
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