Ex-hostage’s mother denies report that claimed IDF told her he was killed by Israeli airstrike

The mother of former hostage Sgt. Ron Sherman, whose body was recovered by the military along with two other hostages last year, says that she was not notified by the army that her son was allegedly killed by an Israeli airstrike, as was claimed in an unconfirmed report yesterday.

“No official representative came to tell us this,” Maayan Sherman is quoted as saying by Army Radio in an interview, after Channel 12 news claimed last night that the IDF has known for months that Sherman, Cpl. Nik Beizer 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 in a strike on a senior Hamas commander in the area.

“The IDF knew this information many months ago, and decided to delay and not publish it. Senior officials in the army, including Chief of Staff [Herzi] Halevi, decided not to publish this to the public,” the report claims.

The IDF responds to the report, saying: “The claims about the chief of staff hiding the investigation are not true. The IDF will complete the 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 found, targeting the commander of Hamas’s Northern Gaza Brigade, Ahmed Ghandour, who was hiding in a tunnel.

Their bodies were later recovered in December, from a Hamas tunnel in Jabaliya.

In January, IDF representatives presented the families with a pathology report showing that their bodies had no signs of trauma or gunfire, indicating that they were not killed directly by an airstrike.

Due to the condition of the bodies, medical officials have so far been unable to determine a cause of death, according to the IDF.