IDF video shows ‘horrific conditions’ in tunnel where 6 hostages were held, executed
Spokesman says other hostages still held in airless ‘tunnels like this’; bodies of 2 Hamas terrorists killed on same day tunnel was found sent for DNA testing, may be the murderers
Emanuel (Mannie) Fabian is The Times of Israel's military correspondent
Footage showing the inside of a tunnel in the southern Gaza Strip where six Israeli hostages were murdered by Hamas terrorists at the end of last month, and their bodies were found and recovered by Israeli troops two days later, was released by the Israel Defense Forces on Tuesday.
The video showed IDF Spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari giving a tour of the claustrophobic underground passageway in Rafah’s Tel Sultan neighborhood. The tunnel was seen littered with bottles of urine, women’s clothes, and large bloodstains on the ground, where the hostages were murdered.
Hostages Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Eden Yerushalmi, Ori Danino, Alex Lobanov, Carmel Gat, and Almog Sarusi were executed in the tunnel by their captors on August 29, before being discovered by troops on August 31.
Alongside the footage, the IDF released new details on the tunnel and the operation to find the bodies of the six murdered Israelis, including that they were being held only some 700 meters away from where another hostage had been rescued alive days earlier.
The tunnel where their bodies were found is a narrow 120-meter-long passageway — not tall enough to stand in without bending over — that connected parts of a large underground network in the Tel Sultan neighborhood, which according to the IDF belonged to Hamas’s Rafah Brigade.
The tunnel network was one of the largest underground complexes found by the army in Gaza to date, military sources said.
Inside the tunnel, located some 20 meters underground, the IDF found food and equipment that it assessed were used by the Hamas terrorists and the Israeli hostages to survive underground for extended periods.
According to IDF sources, the supplies were enough to survive in the tunnel for at least several weeks.
Among the items found in the tunnel were dried food, water, a bucket used as a makeshift toilet, numerous bottles of urine, mattresses, and assault rifle magazines.
The video was shown to the families recently and to members of the Israeli cabinet.
“The tunnel shaft was in a children’s room, in a house,” Hagari said in the video, pointing to Disney characters painted on the walls above the 20-meter-deep shaft. “Snow White and Mickey Mouse on the wall, [above] a tunnel shaft, where the hostages were murdered downstairs,” he said.
“Here you see their blood on the floor. Here you see their last moments, and here they were brutally murdered,” a visibly sweating Hagari said in a Hebrew-language version of the video, while inside the tunnel.
“They were here in this tunnel in horrific conditions, where there is no air to breathe, where you cannot stand. They survived, but they were murdered by terrorists,” Hagari said in an English-language video.
“There are still hostages, 101, some of them are alive in the same conditions in tunnels like this in Gaza. We need to do everything we can… to bring them back home alive,” he added.
The military said it did not have any concrete or real-time intelligence on the six hostages being held there in the weeks before they were murdered, but had general indications that Israeli abductees could be in the neighborhood, and therefore had operated carefully above ground and even more so underground.
After spotting Israeli forces approaching the area, the Hamas terrorists guarding the six hostages decided to execute them, the terror group has hinted. Israel also believes this is what transpired.
On August 30, the IDF discovered the tunnel shaft in a children’s room in a home that had been blocked up by Hamas.
A day later, on August 31, troops finally managed to enter the tunnel using heavy machinery, where inside they discovered a locked blast door — believed to have been locked by the terrorists who murdered the six hostages. Later that day, the bodies of the six were found.
By early on September 1, they were extracted and brought to Israel for identification and burial.
Also on August 30, the IDF said troops killed two Hamas gunmen who attempted to flee from the tunnel complex.
Their bodies were taken to Israel to run DNA testing to determine if they were the terrorists who killed the six hostages. The IDF believed that at least two terrorists killed the six.
Two days before the six hostages were murdered, on August 27, the IDF rescued hostage Farhan al-Qadi from a tunnel — part of the same network — located less than 700 meters away.
There was no direct passage between the tunnel where al-Qadi was found and the bodies of the six hostages, as Hamas had blocked the route. Al-Qadi also did not know about the six hostages being held nearby, according to military sources.
On the night between August 27 and 28, troops exchanged fire with three Hamas gunmen who had attempted to flee from the major tunnel network where al-Qadi was found. All three Hamas operatives and one Israeli soldier, Staff Sgt. Amit Friedman, were killed in the exchange.
The IDF had been operating in Tel Sultan for several weeks to locate tunnel shafts as part of the major Hamas underground network in the area, one of which would later lead soldiers to the bodies of the six hostages.
Names leaked
The IDF’s Information Security Department was also investigating how the names of the six hostages were leaked on social media hours before the bodies were brought out of Gaza for identification, while the troops were still inside the tunnel.
Hagari said the leak not only affected the families who heard about the deaths of their loved ones on social media, but also endangered troops who had still been operating in the tunnel complex.
It is believed that 97 of the 251 hostages abducted by Hamas on October 7 now 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 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.
Senior officer wounded in tunnel collapse
Highlighting the dangers of operating in Hamas tunnels in Gaza, Col. (res.) Golan Vach, a senior Home Front Command search and rescue officer, was wounded in a tunnel collapse in the central Gaza Strip on Tuesday.
The incident came amid efforts to investigate and demolish tunnels in the area, the IDF said.
Vach was trapped inside the tunnel and later rescued, before being taken to a hospital in Israel. He was listed in stable condition.
Hamas battalion commander killed
Also on Tuesday, the IDF announced that the commander of Hamas’s Tel Sultan Battalion in the terror group’s Rafah Brigade — where the bodies of the six hostages were found — was killed in a drone strike several weeks ago.
Mahmoud Hamdan was killed alongside three company commanders in the Tel Sultan Battalion, according to the IDF.
The military said that additional strikes killed several more top commanders in the battalion, along with dozens of operatives.
The IDF said Hamdan took a “significant part” in planning the October 7 onslaught, and was involved in other attacks amid the ongoing war.
