Israeli document shows three of the murdered hostages on list of those set for release in 1st phase of deal
Hebrew newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth has published a partial photo of a document that it says shows hostages Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Carmel Gat and Eden Yerushalmi were on a list of “humanitarian hostages” whose release Israel was expecting in the first phase of a potential ceasefire-hostage deal.
The three were among six hostages murdered by their Hamas captors at the end of last week, whose bodies were found by the IDF in a Gaza tunnel on Saturday and brought back to Israel. Yerushalmi was laid to rest yesterday. Gat and Goldberg-Polin are being laid to rest today.
The document is seven pages long, in English, was finalized on July 27, and was conveyed to the US, Qatari and Egyptian mediators that night and the next day, says the Yedioth article (Hebrew link). It comprises two pages of text, three pages of maps, and two pages of tables including the names of some of the hostages held in Gaza, separated into categories. The three names in the partial photo are listed under the heading, “Annex 2: List of Humanitarian Hostages.”
The report says the name of another of the recently murdered hostages also appears in that table. (Reports yesterday suggested that the three and Almog Sarusi were set for release in the first phase of a deal.)
The Yedioth report says the document sets out what are termed “clarifications” but are in fact changes to the original Israeli hostage-ceasefire proposal from May. These changes, the article says, were demanded by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after it became clear that Hamas had agreed to most of the terms of the May proposal. It quotes unnamed Israeli sources saying that the changes sabotaged the prospects of a deal.
The article is written by Yedioth’s veteran writer Ronen Bergman, who is also an editorial staffer at the New York Times and won a Pulitzer Prize for that paper’s coverage of the Israel-Hamas war.
