Israel’s Military Says 4 More Hostages in Gaza Are Dead, Killed Months Ago (2024)

An Israeli military official said he expected ‘difficult questions’ about how the hostages died.

A spokesman for Hamas’s military wing, Abu Ubaida, had said on March 1 that three of the men — Mr. Cooper, Mr. Metzger and Mr. Perry — were among seven hostages who had been killed by Israeli airstrikes in Gaza.

Hamas said on May 11 that the fourth man, Mr. Popplewell, had died from injuries sustained in an Israeli airstrike more than a month before, and that he had not been able to receive proper medical care because of Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s hospitals. Earlier that day, Hamas had released an undated video of him in captivity.

The New York Times reported in February that Israeli intelligence officers had concluded that at least 30 hostages had died since the start of the war. Hamas’s military wing, the Al-Qassam Brigades, said in March that it believed Israeli military operations in the enclave may have killed more than 70 hostages in total.

Israeli forces shot and killed three of the hostages in December while they were bearing a makeshift white flag, an incident that shocked Israeli society and renewed outrage with the government for continuing its offensive in Gaza instead of negotiating another truce to allow for more hostages to be released.

Another hostage, a grandmother who was kidnapped from Kibbutz Nir Oz on Oct. 7, was likely killed by Israeli fire from a helicopter, the Israeli military said in April.

In a statement demanding that the Israeli government immediately negotiate a deal for the release of the remaining hostages, the Hostages Families Forum, a support group, said the four hostages who were declared dead on Monday were alive when they were kidnapped from Kibbutz Nirim and Kibbutz Nir Oz, and that there had been “signs of life” in the interim period.

“Their murder in captivity is a mark of disgrace and a sad reflection on the significance of delaying previous deals,” the group said.

A Hezbollah barrage ignites fires in northern Israel, and other news.

‘Claims that we have agreed to a cease-fire without our conditions being met are incorrect,’ Netanyahu says.

The domestic political difficulties Mr. Netanyahu faces became evident on Monday when the far-right national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, who is key to his governing coalition, declared again that he would not accept the latest proposal if it left Hamas intact.

He said his party would pull out of the government if Israel moved forward with such an agreement. Without Mr. Ben-Gvir’s six parliamentary seats, Mr. Netanyahu would likely struggle to remain in office.

Hamas has said it views the proposal Mr. Biden outlined “positively” but has not said whether it would accept it. On Sunday, Ghazi Hamad, a senior Hamas official told an Egyptian channel that “the ball” was now “in the Israeli court.”

Another far-right political leader, Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister, threatened to topple the government if it agrees to the proposal. “If the government, God forbid, decides to adopt this proposal of surrender, we will no longer be a part of it and we will take action to replace the failing leadership with a new leadership that knows how to defeat Hamas and win the war,” he said.

Mr. Netanyahu, meanwhile, offered assurances to lawmakers in a closed-door meeting that Israel’s latest proposal would not end the war without ending Hamas’s rule in Gaza. He said it would enable Israel to continue fighting Hamas until all its war aims are achieved, including destroying the military and governing capabilities of the group, which led the deadly Oct. 7 attacks in southern Israel.

“The claims that we have agreed to a cease-fire without our conditions being met are incorrect,” Mr. Netanyahu said on Monday, speaking before the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, according to a statement from his office.

The prime minister expressed openness to a 42-day pause in the fighting — part of the first phase of what U.S. officials have described as the three-phase deal proposed by Israel — but rejected a complete end to the war without Hamas’s defeat or surrender, according to a person present at the committee meeting, who spoke on condition of anonymity to share details of the closed door discussion.

Mr. Netanyahu also claimed that President Biden hadn’t presented the “whole picture” of the latest cease-fire proposal when he spoke about the issue last week, the person at the meeting said.

In his speech on Friday, Mr. Biden went into an unusual level of detail in presenting what he described as the new Israeli framework. He said it amounted to a road map to an “enduring cease-fire” and said that if Hamas abided by its terms, it would lead to the “cessation of hostilities permanently.”

Two Israeli officials confirmed that the offer shared by Mr. Biden generally aligned with the most recent cease-fire proposal that Israel had presented in talks mediated by Qatar and Egypt and supported by the United States.

Earlier on Monday, an official close to Mr. Ben-Gvir said he was supposed to meet with Mr. Netanyahu to discuss Israel’s most recent cease-fire offer and review a written version. But the minister said on Monday afternoon that officials in the prime minister’s office had refused to show him the document, and he made no mention of meeting with Mr. Netanyahu.

The minister said he later received a phone call from Tzachi Hanegbi, the prime minister's national security adviser, who claimed that a written version of the proposal didn’t exist.

Shira Efron, a senior director of policy research at the Israel Policy Forum, said that while Mr. Ben-Gvir and Mr. Smotrich were in a “once in a lifetime coalition” wielding influence in important ministries, they were willing to take risks that could result in the loss of decision-making power.

“They’re true ideologues,” she said in an interview.

For those who fled Rafah, even finding a place to pitch a tent is hard.

Ms. Tayeh is now staying in the least damaged room of her home, which used to be the living room, along with her husband, their son, his wife and three children.

Like thousands of others who were staying in Rafah, Ms. Tayeh’s family decided to flee the city when they heard that an Israeli ground invasion was imminent.

That offensive in and around Rafah, where over a million displaced Palestinians had been sheltering, began last month and has intensified in recent days, despite an international backlash and pressure from allies to scale back the assault and agree to a cease-fire.

The military push has scattered around a million people to other parts of Gaza, according to the United Nations. It was the latest in a string of displacements since Israel launched an assault on Gaza to eliminate Hamas, the armed group that led the deadly attack on Israel on Oct. 7.

Bilal al-Saptie, a 30-year-old construction worker who moved from Rafah to Khan Younis with his family last week, said conditions were so bad that they were hoping to die on the way.

“We were wishing that they would strike us,” he said, adding that a strike from a missile would bring “relief from the suffering, misery and humiliation.”

Mr. al-Saptie had been sheltering in a tent with his wife, two young children and several other family members. They decided to flee Rafah after an Israeli strike and subsequent fire killed dozens of displaced Palestinians in a makeshift tent camp there last week. After borrowing 1,200 shekels, or about $325, to pay for a truck to carry them and their food supply to Khan Younis, the family spent nearly six hours searching for enough space to set up their tents, he said.

They ended up near the beach, in Al-Mawasi, where they bathe and wash their clothes with briny seawater. Inside the tent he shares with his wife and children, which gets hot during the day, they built a makeshift toilet by digging in the ground and laying a pipe.

“The situation is as bad as you can imagine,” said Mr. al-Saptie. “We are waiting for God’s mercy.”

Ashraf Abu Jarad, a newlywed originally from Beit Hanoun in the north, left Rafah a few days before Israeli forces moved in. He could not afford to move his tent or buy a new one because “they cost a lot of money these days, and we don’t even have enough to buy food.”

Mr. Abu Jarad was now staying on the beach in Nuseirat in central Gaza with 27 of his family members, including five who are disabled, he said. The family draped blankets over some metal and wooden scraps to create a basic shelter that shields them from the scalding sun, but does not keep them warm during the chilly nights, he said.

The family has resorted to drinking salt water from the sea, and lacks a bathroom. “We are living on the actual beach, on the sand,” said Mr. Abu Jarad.

Iyad Abuheweila contributed reporting from Istanbul.

Israeli airstrikes on Syria kill a general from a branch Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.

Since then, however, the two countries stepped back from direct confrontations, facing intense international pressure to not ignite a new, wider regional war. And Iran is now enmeshed in a domestic leadership crisis, making a new wave of attacks on Israel seem unlikely.

Iran has been reeling from the sudden death of its president, Ebrahim Raisi, and its foreign minister, Hossein Amir Abdollahian, two weeks ago in a helicopter crash. The country is also preparing for a presidential election on June 28 in which more than 80 candidates, representing a wide array of political factions, have registered as candidates.

Tasnim published a photograph of General Abyar, clad in black and standing at a Shiite shrine. His coffin, draped in the Iranian flag with his photograph attached, was taken to the Sayyida Zaynab shrine in Damascus, photographs on social media showed.

General Abyar was a member of Iran’s Quds Force, a branch of the Revolutionary Guards that operates largely in other countries. He had been in Syria since 2012, when he was deployed to help the government in Damascus fight a civil war with opposition forces and Islamic State terrorists.

The Quds Force now uses Syria as a regional headquarters for coordinating and arming the regional militia groups known as the “axis of resistance,” including in Lebanon, Iraq and the West Bank.

Tasnim reported that Israel attacked several targets on the outskirts of Aleppo overnight on Sunday night and Saturday morning, killing 17 people and injuring 15. The Syria Observatory for Human Rights, based in Britain, said that among the dead were Iraqis, Syrians and members of Lebanon’s Hezbollah. The target appeared to be a copper factory and a weapons warehouse, the group said.

Iran’s interim foreign minister, Ali Bagheri Kani, a hard-liner with close ties to the regional militia, visited Beirut on Monday. There, he held meetings with senior Lebanese officials and senior members of Hezbollah, according to Iranian media.

Mr. Bagheri said at a news conference in Beirut that Israel was a source of instability in the region and asserted that Iran and the regional militant groups it supports were “a source of stability and peace.”

Mr. Bagheri, who led Iran’s delegation in several rounds of secret talks with the United States in Oman about the war in Gaza and other regional issues, said that Tehran and Washington had continued exchanging messages after Mr. Raisi’s death.

Netanyahu’s Far-Right Partners Reject Cease-Fire Compromise

Mr. Biden called the three-phase proposal, which he said was put forward by Israel, a road map to an “enduring cease-fire” and to the release of the remaining hostages in Gaza. If Hamas abided by the agreement’s terms, the president said, it would ultimately lead to the “cessation of hostilities permanently.”

“It’s time to end this war,” Mr. Biden said

Two-far-right members of Mr. Netanyahu’s governing coalition, Itamar Ben-Gvir, the national security minister, and Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister, said on Monday that they could not accept any deal that stops short of completely eliminating Hamas.

As Mr. Biden described it on Friday, the Israeli military’s attacks in Gaza had already eliminated Hamas as a major threat, and that “at this point, Hamas is no longer capable of carrying out another Oct. 7.”

But in the views of Mr. Ben-Gvir and Mr. Smotrich, whose parties make up a small but critical piece of Mr. Netanyahu’s majority, the proposal does not go far enough to guarantee Hamas’s destruction. The men on Monday threatened to pull out of the coalition, taking down the government with them, should the prime minister accept a deal that stops short of destroying Hamas.

“If the government, God forbid, decides to adopt this proposal of surrender, we will no longer be a part of it and we will take action to replace the failing leadership with a new leadership that knows how to defeat Hamas and win the war,” Mr. Smotrich said.

Mr. Ben-Gvir said that what Mr. Biden presented would mean “the surrender of Israel” and “the end of the war without achieving its main goal, the destruction of Hamas.”

Without Mr. Ben-Gvir’s party’s, which holds six parliamentary seats, and Mr. Smotrich’s party, which holds seven, Mr. Netanyahu would likely struggle to remain in office.

Mr. Netanyahu told the legislators on Monday that he would not agree to completely end the war without Hamas’s defeat or surrender, said the person in the meeting. The prime minister’s office reiterated that point in a statement, saying, “The claims that we have agreed to a cease-fire without our conditions being met are incorrect.”

Mr. Netanyahu’s comments underscored how he has struggled to navigate competing pressures from Israel’s allies and the international community, which are demanding a stop to the fighting, and his right-wing coalition partners who want Israel to forge ahead in Gaza until Hamas is eliminated.

Shira Efron, a senior director of policy research at the Israel Policy Forum, said that while Mr. Ben-Gvir and Mr. Smotrich were part of a “once-in-a-lifetime coalition,” they were willing to topple Mr. Netanyahu’s government and lose their powerful ministerial posts in the process.

“They’re true ideologues,” she said in an interview.

Mr. Biden had anticipated that the plan would be unacceptable to some members of the Israeli government, Matthew Miller, a State Department spokesman, said on Monday.

“And of course, we’ve seen some members of the Israeli government already come out and oppose it,” Mr. Miller said. But he said that the proposal was “in the long-term security interests of Israel. It’s obviously in the long-term interests of the Palestinian people, as well.”

Mr. Miller said that since Mr. Biden announced the plan on Friday, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken had spoken to the foreign ministers of Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates. He had also spoken to Benny Gantz, a member of Israel’s war cabinet, and to Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant.

“We’re completely confident,” that Israel supports the cease-fire plan, Mr. Miller said, adding that it was submitted last week to Hamas, which has yet to formally respond.

Hamas has said it “positively views” the proposal as described by Mr. Biden on Friday. It has not said whether it would accept the deal. On Sunday, Ghazi Hamad, a senior Hamas official, told an Egyptian news outlet that “the ball” was now “in the Israeli court.”

Mr. Netanyahu has insisted that the cease-fire proposal would enable Israel to continue fighting Hamas until all its war aims are achieved, including destroying the military and governing capabilities of the group, which led the deadly Oct. 7 attacks in southern Israel.

Two Israeli officials confirmed that the offer shared by Mr. Biden generally aligned with the most recent cease-fire proposal that Israel had presented in talks mediated by Qatar and Egypt.

As much as the world’s focus has been trained on the spiraling death toll and the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, in Israel the focus is on the safety and release of the hostages, many of them civilians, captured on Oct. 7 and taken to Gaza.

The Israeli military said on Monday that it had confirmed that four of the hostages — Haim Peri, Yoram Metzger, Amiram Cooper and Nadav Popplewell — were dead. It said the circ*mstances of their deaths were under investigation and their bodies were still being held by Hamas.

“We estimate the four were killed together in the area of Khan Younis several months ago, while held by Hamas terrorists, while the Israel Defense Forces were operating in Khan Younis,” an Israeli military spokesman, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, said.

Responding to the military’s announcement, the Hostages Families Forum, a group that represents relatives of the hostages, said it was even more critical for the government to secure a deal to free the remaining hostages.

“The Israeli government must send out a negotiating delegation this evening and return all 124 hostages, both living and murdered, to their homes,” the group said, adding: “We reiterate our demand to the Israeli government: approve the Netanyahu deal immediately!”

Adding to the political pressures on Mr. Netanyahu, Mr. Gantz, a centrist, has threatened to leave the emergency wartime government unless the prime minister agrees by June 8 — this Saturday — to a plan that brings home the hostages, addresses the future governance of Gaza, returns displaced Israelis to their homes and advances normalization with Saudi Arabia.

“If you choose the path of zealots, dragging the country into the abyss, we will be forced to leave the government,” Mr. Gantz said in a televised news conference last month. “We will turn to the people and build a government that will earn the people’s trust.”

Reporting was contributed by Michael Levenson and Johnatan Reiss.