JERUSALEM - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Friday said he would ensure “Hamas pays the full price” for failing to hand over Israeli mother Shiri Bibas after the militant group released a body Israel said was not hers.
A Hamas official told AFP the group was investigating the matter and Bibas was likely “mistakenly mixed” with others killed and buried under the rubble in Gaza.
On Thursday militants in Gaza handed back the bodies of four people they said were Israeli hostages.
The transfer occurred under a fragile ceasefire which is on Saturday to see the latest swap of live Israeli hostages for Palestinian prisoners. Hamas’s armed wing confirmed on Friday that it will release six Israelis.
Hamas had said the remains returned on Thursday included those of Bibas and her two young sons, whose father the Palestinian group released earlier this month.
On Friday, however, Israel said the body purported to be of Shiri Bibas was instead that of a Gazan.
Netanyahu accused Hamas of violating the Gaza ceasefire deal by failing to return the mother and instead placing “the body of a Gazan woman in a coffin.”
“We will act with determination to bring Shiri home, along with all of our captives –- both the living and the fallen -– and ensure that Hamas pays the full price for this cruel and evil violation of the agreement,” Netanyahu said.
Military spokesman Avichay Adraee said on Telegram that Israel had identified the remains of the Bibas boys Ariel and Kfir, accusing “Palestinian terrorists” of killing them in November 2023.
Hamas has long maintained an Israeli air strike killed the boys and their mother early in the war.
Israel’s Hostages and Missing Families Forum said it was “horrified” that Shiri Bibas was not among those returned.
Hamas on Friday asked Israel to return the body of the Gazan woman handed over a day earlier.
Black coffins
Via the Red Cross, Hamas also handed over a fourth body, that of Oded Lifshitz, a veteran journalist and long-time defender of Palestinian rights who was aged 83 at the time of his capture.
The bodies’ repatriation is part of the six-week initial phase of the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, which took effect on January 19. The deal has so far led to the release of 19 living Israeli hostages in exchange for more than 1,100 Palestinian prisoners.
Ahead of the handover, Hamas and members of other armed Palestinian groups displayed four black coffins with small photos of the purported deceased, on a stage in the southern city of Khan Yunis.
“It is probably one of the saddest days Israel has known, one of the saddest days I can remember,” said Elisheva Flamm Oren, a 66-year-old social worker in Jerusalem.
She called Shiri Bibas “a symbol for all of us.”
During their October 7, 2023 attack that triggered the Gaza war, Hamas filmed and later broadcast footage showing the Bibas family’s abduction from their home near the Gaza border.
Ariel was then aged four, while Kfir was the youngest hostage at just nine months old. Yarden Bibas, the boys’ father and Shiri’s husband, was abducted separately and released in a previous hostage-prisoner swap.
Hamas said in a statement on Thursday that it and its armed wing had done “everything in their power to protect the prisoners (hostages) and preserve their lives”.
Netanyahu on Friday ordered an “intensive operation against centers of terrorism” in the occupied West Bank, his office said, after three buses exploded in central Israel without causing any reported injuries.
Next phase
Israel and Hamas announced a deal earlier this week for the return of eight hostages’ remains in two groups this week and next, as well as the release of the six living Israeli captives on Saturday.
Israeli campaign group the Hostages and Missing Families Forum has published the names of the six Israelis as Eliya Cohen, Tal Shoham, Omer Shem Tov, Omer Wenkert, Hisham al-Sayed and Avera Mengistu.
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar has said talks will begin this week on the truce’s second phase, aiming to lay out a more permanent end to the war.
A Hamas spokesman on Thursday accused Netanyahu of “procrastinating regarding the second phase”, saying the group was “ready to engage”.
Senior Hamas official Taher al-Nunu told AFP on Wednesday that Hamas was ready to free all remaining hostages held in Gaza in a single swap during phase two.
Hamas and its allies took 251 people hostage during the October 7 attack. Prior to Thursday’s handover, there were 70 hostages still in Gaza, including 35 the Israeli military has said are dead.
That attack resulted in the deaths of 1,211 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.
Israel’s retaliatory campaign has killed at least 48,319 people in Gaza, the majority of them civilians, according to figures from the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory that the United Nations considers reliable.