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Awful news, and enraging. Israeli forces found the bullet-ridden bodies of six hostages known to have been captured alive by Hamas in a Rafah tunnel earlier today. One of the hostages killed was Hersh Goldberg-Polin, an American whose parents pleaded for his release at the Democrat convention.
Hamas had murdered them no longer than 48 hours before their bodies were discovered:
The bodies of hostages Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Eden Yerushalmi, Carmel Gat, Almog Sarusi, Alexander Lobanov, and Ori Danino were found in the Gaza Strip, the IDF said on Sunday morning.
The IDF retrieved the bodies of the hostages from a tunnel under the city of Rafah in Gaza.
They were likely slaughtered by Hamas shortly before the IDF got to them in Rafah.
The hostages didn’t get killed as a direct result of a firefight between IDF forces and Hamas terrorists. The IDF didn’t encounter any resistance in the tunnels after a battle at ground level above them:
IDF sources did say that if the bodies were indeed those of hostages, they were not killed by any recent fight with Hamas in the area since the military did not use force nearby.
The IDF’s main spokesman related the results of autopsies conducted after the bodies were recovered. They had been alive at least as late as last week:
Their bodies were found with gunshot wounds to the head and other parts of their bodies, the Ynet news site reported. An autopsy found they were murdered in the 48 hours prior to the discovery of their bodies, the report said.
