Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pledged on Sunday to 'settle the score' with Hamas after recovering the bodies of six hostages from a Gaza tunnel. Netanyahu stated, 'Those who kill hostages do not want an agreement' for a Gaza truce, and warned Hamas leaders, 'We will hunt you down, we will catch you, and we will settle the score'. He emphasized that Israel is 'fighting on all fronts against a cruel enemy who wants to murder us all', citing a shooting attack near Hebron in the occupied West Bank that killed three police officers earlier on Sunday. Although Hamas did not claim responsibility for the attack, it described it as a 'heroic operation by the resistance'. Netanyahu asserted that 'the fact that Hamas continues to commit atrocities such as those it committed on October 7 obliges us to do everything we can to ensure that it can no longer do so', referring to the Palestinian group's attack on southern Israel that sparked the ongoing war in the Gaza Strip.
A senior Hamas official revealed that several of the six hostages found dead had been 'approved' for release in the event of a truce deal, which has yet to be finalized despite months of mediation efforts. 'Some of the names of the captives announced as found by the (Israeli) occupier...were part of the list of hostages to be released that Hamas had approved' in a proposed exchange for Palestinian prisoners held in Israel, the official stated. Israeli media reported that US-Israeli hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin and two others whose bodies had been recovered from Gaza — Carmel Gat and Eden Yerushalmi — had been approved by Hamas to be released in the event of a truce deal. The Hamas official accused the Israeli military of killing the six captives through 'fire and bombing', a claim denied by the Israeli military. Military spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Nadav Shoshani stated in an online briefing with journalists that 'according to our initial assessment, they were brutally murdered by Hamas terrorists'. He also dismissed claims by Hamas that the hostages were killed by Israeli forces as 'psychological warfare'. The bodies were found in a tunnel in the southern city of Rafah, approximately one kilometer away from where troops had rescued another hostage, Kaid Farhan Alkadi, alive on Tuesday, according to Shoshani.
