Gaza Conflict: Killing of Israeli hostage family overshadows truce negotiations

An unverified claim by Hamas that a family of Israeli hostages, including a 10-month-old baby, had been killed overshadowed at the last minute on Wednesday the negotiations between Israel and Hamas to prolong the Gaza truce.

The armed branch of Hamas announced just before the truce’s last release of women and children that the youngest hostage, infant Kfir Bibas, together with his mother and four-year-old brother Ariel, had perished in an earlier Israeli bombardment. The statement contained no mention of their father, who has also been detained.

Israeli officials said they were checking the Hamas claim, a highly emotive issue in Israel where the family is among the highest-profile civilian hostages yet to be freed.

“The IDF (Israel Defense Forces) is assessing the accuracy of the information,” the military said in a statement which said that it held Hamas responsible for the safety of all the hostages in Gaza.

After the parents and kids were left out of the penultimate group of people released on Tuesday, family members filed a special plea to be released with the family.

According to an Israeli official, extending the ceasefire without a pledge to free all of the hostages’ women and children would be unthinkable. The ceasefire was set to expire on Thursday morning. The person stated that Israel thought there were still enough women and children being held by terrorists to extend the ceasefire by two or three days.

Additionally, according to Egyptian security sources, negotiators thought a two-day extension was feasible.

The names of the Israeli prisoners who were scheduled to be released later on Wednesday had already been disclosed to their families; if the truce could not be extended, these hostages would be the last to be freed. At the time, officials remained silent on whether the Bibas family was included in that.

The leaders of Hamas in Gaza have revealed a list of fifteen women and fifteen teenagers who will be freed from Israeli prisons in exchange for the hostages that were freed on Wednesday. On October 7, during their fatal invasion on Israel, the extremists took the captives.

The list of Palestinians to be released included Israeli citizens as well as inhabitants of occupied territory for the first time since the truce’s inception.

As per the agreement that resulted in the first ceasefire in the conflict, Gaza militants have released 60 Israeli women and children out of 240 hostages thus far. Under different parallel agreements, twenty-one foreigners, mostly farmworkers from Thailand, were also released. 180 Palestinian women and teenagers who were detained for security reasons have been freed by Israel in exchange.

Tuesday saw a 48-hour extension of the first four-day truce, and Israel says it is willing to extend it further as long as Hamas releases ten hostages every day. However, since there are now fewer women and children held captive, that may require first agreeing to conditions governing the release of at least some Israeli men.

The cease-fire has provided the first reprieve in Israel’s fight to destroy Hamas, which was sparked by gunmen’s “Black Shabbat” raid, which, according to Israel’s count, claimed 1,200 lives on the Jewish rest day.

Since then, Israeli bombardment has left most of Gaza a wasteland, with over 15,000 confirmed deaths—40% of them children—according to Palestinian health officials that the UN has found to be credible.

There could be a lot more hidden among the rubble. About 6,500 individuals were still unaccounted for, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry, which also reported that 160 more remains had been extricated from debris in the last 24 hours of the ceasefire.

(With agency inputs)