Ex-hostage’s mother denies IDF told her he was killed in Gaza airstrike
Military denies report alleging army chief hid details of deaths of hostages whose bodies were recovered in December; Ron Sherman’s mother says her family had no official word
Emanuel (Mannie) Fabian is The Times of Israel's military correspondent
The mother of former hostage Sgt. Ron Sherman, whose body was recovered by the military along with two other hostages last year, said on Tuesday that she had not been notified by the army that her son was allegedly killed by an Israeli airstrike.
“No official representative came to tell us this,” Maayan Sherman said in an interview with Army Radio, after Channel 12 news claimed on Monday evening that the IDF had known for months that Sherman, 19, Cpl. Nik Beizer, 19, and civilian Elia Toledano were killed by Israeli fire.
The Channel 12 report, which did not cite any sources, said that last month IDF representatives presented the families with the alleged findings, according to which the three hostages were killed due to a strike on a senior Hamas commander in the area.
Sherman’s mother told Army Radio that while they had heard rumors, no IDF representative had presented them with the information that the hostages were killed directly by an IDF strike.
She said that, according to the unofficial information the family had heard, the three likely died of carbon dioxide poisoning due to lack of oxygen in the tunnel following the strike.
The IDF said in January, when it presented findings to the families, that it could neither confirm nor deny that the hostages may have suffocated or been poisoned, or died due to any other cause indirectly related to an IDF attack or Hamas action. Toxicology tests, which could shed light on their cause of death, had yet to be completed at the time.
“The IDF knew this information many months ago and decided to delay and not publish it. Senior officials in the army, including IDF Chief of Staff [Herzi] Halevi, decided not to make this information public,” the Channel 12 report said on Monday.
The IDF refuted the report, saying, “The claims that the chief of staff is hiding the investigation are not true. The IDF will complete its investigation into the circumstances of the deaths of the hostages… in the coming days and it will be presented to the families.”
In November, the IDF carried out an airstrike near the location where the bodies were later found, targeting the commander of Hamas’s Northern Gaza Brigade, Ahmed Ghandour, who was hiding in a tunnel. The bodies were recovered in December, from the same tunnel network in Jabaliya.
A Hamas propaganda video released a week after the three were found showed their bodies and claimed they had been killed in an airstrike.
Sherman and Beizer were both kidnapped from an IDF base near the Gaza border on October 7, while Toledano was abducted from the Supernova rave near Kibbutz Re’im, when thousands of Hamas-led terrorists burst across the border into Israel, slaughtering some 1,200 people and seizing 251 hostages, mostly civilians, while committing acts of brutality and sexual assault.
In January, IDF representatives presented the families of Sherman and Beizer with a pathology report showing that the bodies had no signs of trauma or gunfire, indicating that they were not killed directly by an airstrike.
The IDF said that due to the condition of the bodies, medical officials had so far been unable to determine a cause of death.
At that time, the families were also given findings from the operation in which the remains were recovered.
It is believed that 97 of the 251 hostages abducted by Hamas on October 7 remain in Gaza, including the bodies of at least 33 confirmed dead by the IDF.
Hamas released 105 civilians during a weeklong truce in late November, and four hostages were released before that. Eight hostages have been rescued by troops alive, and the bodies of 37 hostages have also been recovered, including three mistakenly killed by the Israeli military as they tried to escape their captors.
Hamas is also holding two Israeli civilians who entered the Strip in 2014 and 2015, as well as the bodies of two IDF soldiers who were killed in 2014.
Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.
