The Israeli military on Wednesday recovered the bodies of five Israelis who Hamas terrorists murdered on October 7, and their corpses were dragged into Gaza.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF), supported by the Shin Bet security agency, discovered the bodies inside a terror tunnel located in Khan Yunis, a southern Gaza town where Israeli troops are currently fighting terrorists who are trying to regroup in the area — a few miles west of the Hamas stronghold of Rafah.
The hostages or their remains “were being held below an area that was previously designated as a Humanitarian Area by the IDF, an area for Gazan civilians to move away from the battlefield and receive humanitarian aid and shelter.,” the Israel news website Arutz Sheva noted.
The recovered bodies included the remains of 56-year-old Maya Goren, a mother of four. Her husband, Avner, was murdered by terrorists in Kibbutz Nir Oz. Other bodies brought back from Gaza belong to IDF officers and soldiers murdered by Hamas terrorists on October 7.
“Ravid Katz, 51, Oren Goldin, 33, Maya Goren, 56, Sgt. Kiril Brodski, 19, and Staff Sgt. Tomer Yaakov Ahimas, 20, were all previously declared dead by the Israel Defense Forces, though their bodies continued to be held in Gaza until Wednesday,” The Times of Israel reported.
The Jerusalem Post reported the details of the dangerous recovery operation carried out in a combat zone:
The IDF said that its intelligence units were working with the Shin Bet for weeks on the exact location and planning for an operation to recover the bodies.Eventually, late Tuesday night, the IDF discovered a tunnel in a humanitarian zone within Khan Yunis (in a general area that Hamas was using to hide behind human shields).The Yahalom tunnel unit spent 12 hours digging and then exploring the tunnel and found that it extended for 200 meters and ran 20 meters deep with a number of rooms, with the bodies of the dead hostages located in one of those rooms.https://twitter.com/HenMazzig/status/1816317541532443024
A day after a misfired Hamas rocket fell on a school in central Gaza, another terrorist rocket hit a United Nations-run UNRAW school in the southern Gaza town of Khan Yunis. The blast in the school ended up “killing and injuring multiple civilians,” the IDF disclosed.
On Wednesday, Hamas “launched numerous projectiles from the Humanitarian Area in Khan Yunis. The projectiles did not cross into Israeli territory and instead fell in the area of the UNRWA ‘Al-Qarara’ school in Khan Yunis,” the IDF revealed in a press statement Thursday.
The Israeli military took the injured Gazans to a nearby field hospital. The “injured civilians were evacuated to receive initial medical treatment at the International Medical Corps (IMC) field hospital in Dier al Balah, which was established during the war,” the IDF added.
Israeli troops continued the military operation in Khan Yunis and Rafah, both areas of southern Gaza, where the IDF largely evacuated civilians. “Over the past few days, during IDF operations against terrorist infrastructure and operatives in the area of Khan Yunis, the troops eliminated dozens of terrorists and dismantled approximately 50 terrorist infrastructure sites,” the IDF informed. “The IDF is continuing precise, intelligence-based operational activity in the area of Rafah. In one incident in the area, IDF troops identified two terrorists and directed an IAF aircraft to eliminate them.”
CLICK HERE FOR FULL VERSION OF THIS STORY