LAST UPDATE | 9 Dec 2023
AN ISRAELI HOSTAGE held by Hamas in Gaza has allegedly been killed, the man’s kibbutz community said, after the Palestinian militant group claimed he had died during a failed rescue attempt.
Sahar Baruch, 25, is the latest confirmed fatality among scores of Israelis and foreigners taken captive during Hamas’s October 7 attacks on southern Israel.
Separate statements from the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) and Hamas confirmed that a hostage rescue operation took place without success.
Beeri, the Gaza border community Baruch was from, and the Israeli Hostages and Missing Families Forum said in a joint statement he had been “murdered”.
“It is with deep sorrow and a broken heart that we announce the murder of Sahar Baruch,” the statement said.
Israel earlier this week counted 138 hostages who remain in Gaza, out of around 240 taken on October 7 during attacks that officials say killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians.
Israel’s retaliatory bombardment and ground offensive targeting Hamas has killed at least 17,490 people in Gaza, most of them women and children, according to the latest toll from the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry.
On Friday the Israeli army said two soldiers were wounded in an overnight hostage rescue operation that failed to retrieve any captives.
It said “numerous terrorists who took part in the abducting and holding of hostages were killed”.
Hamas said fighters of its military wing, Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, had “succeeded in foiling an Israeli attempt to free an Israeli captive”.
“A fierce gunfight broke out between al-Qassam fighters and the Israeli special force, leaving many soldiers wounded while the captive Israeli… was announced killed,” Hamas said in an English-language statement late on Friday.
It released a video showing what it said was the hostage’s body. AFP was unable to independently verify its authenticity.
Kibbutz Beeri was one of the worst hit communities in Hamas’s October 7 attacks. Out of a population of 1,100, more than 80 were killed including Baruch’s brother Idan, according to today’s statement.
“We will demand the return of his body as part of any abductee return deal,” said the kibbutz and the forum representing hostages and their families. “We won’t stop until everyone is home.”
A one-week truce that ended on December 1 saw 105 hostages released from Gaza, including foreigners as well as 80 Israelis — mostly women and children — freed in exchange for 240 Palestinians jailed by Israel.
Fighting continued in the region today, hours after the US vetoed a United Nations resolution backed by the vast majority of Security Council members demanding an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza.
The vote came amid Palestinian civilians facing what the UN chief called a “humanitarian nightmare”.
US deputy ambassador Robert Wood criticised the council after the vote for its failure to condemn Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel in which the militants killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, or to acknowledge Israel’s right to defend itself.
He declared that halting military action would allow Hamas to continue to rule Gaza and “only plant the seeds for the next war”.
“For that reason, while the United States strongly supports a durable peace, in which both Israelis and Palestinians can live in peace and security, we do not support calls for an immediate ceasefire,” Wood said.
Israel’s more than two-month military campaign has killed more than 17,400 people in Gaza — 70% of them women and children — and wounded more than 46,000, according to the Palestinian territory’s Health Ministry, which says many others are trapped under rubble. The ministry does not differentiate between civilian and combatant deaths.
In their latest round of operations, the Israeli military has begun rounding up Palestinian men in northern Gaza for interrogation during its search for Hamas militants.
Israeli government spokesman Eylon Levy said on Friday that those detained in northern Gaza were “military-aged men who were discovered in areas that civilians were supposed to have evacuated weeks ago”.
UN monitors said Israeli troops reportedly detained men and boys from the age of 15 in a school-turned-shelter.
Israeli Defence Forces spokesman Daniel Hagari said that in the past 48 hours, some 200 people have been detained. Dozens have been taken to Israel for interrogation, including Hamas commanders, he said.
The detentions pointed to Israeli efforts to secure the military’s hold on northern Gaza as the war enters its third month.
The first images of mass detentions emerged on Thursday from the northern town of Beit Lahiya, showing dozens of men kneeling or sitting in the streets, stripped down to their underwear, their hands bound behind their backs.
The London-based news outlet Al-Araby al-Jadeed, or The New Arab, said one of the men seen in the images of the detainees is its Gaza correspondent Diaa al-Kahlout, and that he was rounded up with other civilians.
Elsewhere in the region, Yemen’s Houthi rebels threatened on Saturday to attack any vessels heading to Israeli ports unless food and medicine were allowed into the besieged Gaza Strip.
In a statement posted on social media, the Huthis said they “will prevent the passage of ships heading to the Zionist entity” if humanitarian aid is not allowed into Hamas-ruled Gaza.
Israel’s national security adviser, Tzachi Hanegbi, said his country would not accept the “naval siege”.
“If the world will not take care of it,” Hanegbi warned on Israel’s Channel 12 television, “we will take action to remove the naval siege.”
Last week, the Houthis attacked two ships off the Yemeni coast, including a Bahamas-flagged vessel, claiming they were Israeli-owned.
Beyond maritime attacks, the Houthis have launched a series of drone and missile strikes targeting Israel since the outbreak of war on 7 October.
The council called the emergency meeting to hear from secretary-general Antonio Guterres, who for the first time invoked Article 99 of the UN Charter, which enables a UN chief to raise threats he sees to international peace and security.
He warned of a “humanitarian catastrophe” in Gaza and urged the council to demand a humanitarian ceasefire.
More than 60% of Gaza’s housing has reportedly been destroyed or damaged, some 85% of the population has been forced from their homes, the health system is collapsing, and “nowhere in Gaza is safe”, Guterres said.
Peter Power, executive director at UNICEF Ireland, said that the situation in Gaza is unconscionable.
“The Gaza Strip is now the most dangerous place in the world to be a child. Our colleagues on the ground are completely overwhelmed as they attend to children with missing limbs and third-degree burns.
“Rather than resting and recovering from their injuries, they no longer have homes to do this in and face the daily reality of forcible displacement further south, where over one million children are already living in overcrowded squalor.”
Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian UN ambassador, told the council that Israel’s objective is “the ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip” and “the dispossession and forcible displacement of the Palestinian people”.
“If you are against the destruction and displacement of the Palestinian people, you have to be in favour of an immediate ceasefire,” Mansour said. “When you refuse to call for a ceasefire, you are refusing to call for the only thing that can put an end to war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.”
Israel’s UN ambassador Gilad Erdan stressed that regional stability and the security of Israelis and Gazans “can only be achieved once Hamas is eliminated – not one minute before”.
“So the true path to ensure peace is only through supporting Israel’s mission — absolutely not to call for a ceasefire,” he told the council.
In Washington, Jordan’s top diplomat told reporters that the killings of Palestinian civilians in Israel’s bombardment and siege of Gaza were war crimes and threatened to destabilise the region, the US and the world for years to come.
Additional reporting from AFP
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