Posted on 09/10/24
| News Source: JPost
The IDF confirmed publicly on Tuesday that it mistakenly killed three Israeli hostages along with Hamas Gaza City Brigade Chief Admed An-Dur in December, which, until now, officials had only hinted to.
Back in December, the IDF revealed finding five hostage bodies, three of which related to the incident in question.
Unlike the IDF's usual briefing, it did not blame Hamas for their deaths and dropped hints that its air strike might have killed the three hostages but said it would not confirm anything until after a forensics probe.
Overnight between Monday and Tuesday, the IDF finally confirmed that it had killed the three when Channel 12 reported the military had passed on the information to the hostage families but was withholding an announcement from the public.
The IDF disputed Channel 12's characterization of a cover-up but has not provided a coherent explanation as to why it did not publicize the probe results to the public.
Already in December, the IDF disclosed the background behind its finding of five bodies of hostages held by Hamas in an underground strategic size tunnel near Jabalia in northern Gaza.
Around December 12, the IDF found two bodies, and around three days later, it found three more bodies in another area nearby. At the time, it only announced the finding of the first two bodies.
The tunnel reached a size that included a large elevator, large rooms, and which split into side rooms, such as command centers, medical stations, prayer rooms, and rooms for manufacturing weapons.
An IDF source said that finding the bodies required a mix of preexisting intelligence that headquarters possessed, along with intelligence collected in real-time in the field, including forensic methods.
The tunnel was so large that though the bodies were all, in a sense, within one general tunnel area, they were in very different portions of the tunnel.