The Israeli war cabinet has approved new guidelines for Israeli negotiators to help revive the talks on a hostage-for-truce deal with Hamas, the local media reports said on Thursday after a high-level forum was convened.
The meeting was held after the families of hostages released harrowing footage showing the abduction of five female soldiers from the Nahal Oz base by Hamas on October 7 with some of the parents saying their goal in releasing the video was to wake up the country to work urgently to secure their release, The Times of Israel reported.
An Israeli campaign group on Wednesday released footage of five Israeli female soldiers being captured by Palestinian militants from a military base during the October 7 attack, after their families gave permission. The three-minute clip showed the women sitting on the ground, some with blood on their faces, with their hands tied following their capture from the Nahal Oz base in southern Israel.
The footage was taken from a two-hour video filmed on a body camera by Hamas militants during the attack, the campaign group the Hostage and Missing Families Forum said in a statement. “The footage reveals the violent, humiliating, and traumatising treatment the girls endured on the day of their abduction, their eyes filled with raw terror,” the forum said as it released the footage to the media. Towards the end of the clip, the women are seen being taken away by militants in a military jeep amid screams.
After the base was stormed by Hamas militants on October 7, more than 50 Israeli soldiers were killed in the attack, 15 of whom were women. Seven female soldiers were taken hostage and one has since been freed in an Israeli military operation, while the body of another was found and brought to Israel. Hamas said the video footage was “manipulated” with a selection of images aimed at supporting “false allegations” to “tarnish the image of the resistance”.
Some of the soldiers were bleeding or sustained minor injuries, “but there was no physical aggression against any of them”, the Palestinian Islamist movement said in a statement. Hamas’s unprecedented attack on October 7 resulted in the deaths of more than 1,170 people, mostly civilians. Militants also took 252 hostages, 124 of whom remain in Gaza, including 37 the army says are dead. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has come under intense pressure from the families of the hostages to negotiate the return of their loved ones from Gaza.
Netanyahu promised in a statement on Wednesday to continue fighting Hamas to “ensure what we have seen tonight never happens again”. His office later said that the war cabinet had asked the Israeli negotiating team “to continue negotiations for the return of the hostages”. Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed at least 35,709 people in Gaza, most of them civilians, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry. The Israeli military says 287 soldiers have been killed in Gaza since the start of its ground offensive on October 27.
(With agency inputs)
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