Palestinian terrorists paraded the caskets of Israeli hostages, including what Hamas said were the bodies of a mother and two small children, during a Thursday ceremony where crowds of Gazans cheered them on.
Videos from Khan Younis, Gaza, showed Hamas members and other terrorists carrying the four hostages as part of an exchange with Israel for detained Palestinian criminals, the Wall Street Journal reported. Without evidence, Hamas has blamed the hostages’ deaths on Israeli missiles fired at the group after its Oct. 7, 2023 massacre of Israelis that sparked a 15-month war.
Video on Instagram from a self-described Gazan journalist shows four masked militants loading a casket into a Red Cross aid truck while another figure wearing symbols of Palestinian Islamic Jihad follows them with a camera. Another video the creator posted had crowds of adults and children waving and cheering for Hamas fighters as they rode by in trucks with weapons raised.
Footage from Reuters also shows a man with a Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PLFP) headband helping others carry another casket. Islamic Jihad and the PLFP both joined Hamas in the Oct. 7 attacks.
Hamas presented three of the bodies as a mother and two children from the Bibas family who were captured when the children were 4 years and less than a year old, according to the Wall Street Journal. The children have been reported as the youngest hostages from the Oct. 7 invasion. Israel has identified the fourth deceased hostage as 83-year-old Oded Lifshitz, Jewish News Syndicate reported.
Israel media said Yarden Bibas, the father of the Bibas family, was freed on Feb. 1 after Hamas allegedly tortured him in captivity by frequently taunting him about his family members’ uncertain fates.
Israel and Hamas are under a temporary ceasefire agreement that stipulates the release of dozens of Palestinian convicts in prison in exchange for civilian hostages held by Hamas. The group has repeatedly promised a future repeat of the Oct. 7 attacks, which brought the largest slaughter of Jewish people since the Holocaust.
A Thursday video from NBC News showed hostage caskets placed on a stage with a poster depicting Israel as a “Nazi Army.” Hamas was created in the 1980s with a founding charter describing the group’s “struggle against the Jews” and its goal of “killing the Jews.”
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