Hamas claims 3 hostages were killed in Israeli operation in Gaza
World
Hamas' al-Qassam Brigades said three hostages were killed, including a US citizen.
CAIRO (Reuters) - Hamas' armed al-Qassam Brigades said in a video posted on its Telegram channel on Sunday (Jun 9) that three hostages were killed, including a US citizen, in an Israeli military operation on Saturday in which some hostages were freed.
The group did not release the names of those said to be killed, but the video showed what appeared to be three unidentifiable corpses using censor bars over their faces.
Israel rescued four hostages held by Hamas in a hostage-freeing operation in central Gaza's al-Nuseirat on Saturday which killed 274 Palestinians.
A Hamas assertion on Saturday that some hostages were killed in the operation was dismissed shortly afterwards as a "blatant lie" by an Israeli military spokesman.
The Palestinian death toll is the worst over a 24-hour period of the Gaza war for months and includes many women and children, Palestinian medics said.
ISRAEL CHEERS RESCUE OF 4 HOSTAGES
Israelis on Sunday cheered the rescue of four hostages from war-torn Gaza while Palestinians counted the cost, with Palestinian officials saying 274 people were killed and hundreds wounded during the daytime raid.
Special forces fought gun battles with Palestinian militants on Saturday in central Gaza's crowded Nuseirat refugee camp area as they swooped in to free the captives from two buildings and then flew them out by helicopters.
The Israeli military said the extraction team and captives came under heavy gun and grenade fire, which killed one police officer, while Israel's air force launched strikes that reduced nearby buildings to rubble.
The health ministry in the Hamas-run territory said 274 people were killed and 698 wounded, in what it labelled the "Nuseirat massacre", figures that could not be independently verified.
Among those were at least 64 children, 57 women and 37 elderly people, the ministry said.
"My child was crying, afraid of the sound of the plane firing at us," said one Gaza woman, Hadeel Radwan, 32, recounting how they fled the intense combat as she carried her seven-month-old daughter.
"We all felt that we wouldn't survive," she told AFP, condemning "this brutal occupation that will not let us live".
Noa Argamani, 26, Almog Meir Jan, 22, Andrey Kozlov, 27, and Shlomi Ziv, 41, had been abducted from the Nova music festival during Hamas's October 7 attack.
Many Israelis shed tears of joy when they heard of the release of the four captives, all reported in good health.
The army released footage of the freed captives embracing their family members, and the government press office showed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visiting them in hospital.
But Meir Jan's joy at being released was undercut by the death of his father of a heart attack just one day earlier.
Israel's leading dailies, Yedioth Ahronoth and Israel Hayom, showed Argamani embraced by her father on their front pages under the same simple headline: "Home".
RENEWED CLASHES
Hamas's armed wing, the Ezzedine Al-Qassam Brigades, claimed that other hostages were killed during the rescue operation, and warned that conditions would worsen for the remaining captives.
"The operation will pose a great danger (for) the enemy's prisoners and will have a negative impact on their conditions," spokesman Abu Obaida wrote on the Telegram channel.
Israel's top diplomat rejected accusations "of war crimes" in the operation.
"We will continue to act with determination and strength, in accordance with our right to self-defence, until all of the hostages are freed and Hamas is defeated," Foreign Minister Israel Katz said.
Seeking to explain the civilian toll and damage from the raid, Israeli military spokesman Peter Lerner told US network ABC that forces "came under fire from a 360-degree threat. RPGs, AK-47s, explosive devices on the way, mortar rounds. It was and is a war zone."
Subsequent fighting saw four members of one family killed when an air strike hit their house in Gaza City's Al-Daraj area, in the territory's north, according to Al-Ahli hospital medics.
Israeli helicopters were also firing east of the Bureij camp, near Nuseirat, witnesses told AFP.
And heavy artillery shelling from Israeli army tanks hit central and northern areas of Rafah, said officials in the southern city.
The four freed hostages are among only seven that Israeli forces have managed to rescue alive since Palestinian militants seized 251 in their October 7 attack.
Dozens were exchanged in a November truce for Palestinian prisoners. After Saturday's rescue operation, 116 hostages remain in Gaza, although the army says 41 of them are dead.
