TEL AVIV: Holding up signs reading “sorry and welcome back” and “complete the ceasefire,” hundreds of Israelis gathered in Tel Aviv’s “Hostages Square” on Saturday to watch Hamas release three Israeli hostages from Gaza.
In smaller groups, friends and relatives of the released men — Israeli-American Sagui Dekel-Chen, 36, Israeli-Russian Sasha Trupanov, 29, and Israeli-Argentine Yair Horn, 46 — shed tears of joy at the sight of their loved ones, who were made to address a crowd in Gaza from a stage alongside rifle-wielding militants.
All three men were taken from Nir Oz, a kibbutz community near the Gaza border, during Hamas’s unprecedented attack on Israel on October 7, 2023 which sparked the war.
Dekel-Chen’s wife, Avital, who gave birth to the couple’s third daughter two months after her husband was seized, was waiting for him at an army base in southern Israel.
“My breath has returned. He looks so handsome,” she said following his release in a call to her sister aired by Israel’s Kan public broadcaster.
Other relatives of Dekel-Chen said they were relieved to see him alive.
“I am excited, and I see that he looks OK, and I want to hug him,” his mother-in-law told Kan, wiping away tears.
Dekel-Chen’s sister-in-law said: “Thank God that everything is OK and they were on their feet.”
They watched the release from the town of Carmei Gat in southern Israel, where some residents of Nir Oz have moved to since the attack.
In Kfar Saba, in central Israel, a friend of the Horn family, Ronnie Milo, told AFP that she was experiencing “unimaginable joy” on seeing him return alive.
Ronli Nissim, of the Hostages and Missing Families Forum campaign group, said: “It’s an emotional roller coaster, and also very bittersweet.”
“Every time someone comes back... we are just a jumble of emotions,” she said.
“But then we’re thinking about everyone who’s left behind, and we know that they are mistreated, we know that they’re in hell, and they’re just waiting to be released.”
So far under the Gaza truce, 19 Israeli hostages have been released in exchange of hundreds of Palestinians in Israeli custody.
The 42-day first phase of the truce stipulates the release of a total of 33 hostages, including eight Israel says are dead, in exchange for some 1,900 Palestinian prisoners.
Out of the 251 people abducted during the October 7, 2023 attack by Hamas militants, 70 remain in Gaza, with half of them dead according to the Israeli military.
In Ramat Gan, near Tel Aviv, Trupanov’s friends and family clapped, cheered and cried as they watched the 29-year-old, who had been held by Hamas’s ally Islamic Jihad, step out of a car in Gaza.
In a statement from the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, Trupanov’s family said they were grateful to see him return.
“Finally, Sasha can be surrounded by his loved ones and begin a new path,” said the statement, adding that they did not know if Trupanov was “aware that his father, Vitaly, was murdered on October 7.”
“This knowledge — or lack thereof — will completely transform his homecoming from a day of great joy to one of deep mourning for his beloved father,” they said.
‘Welcome back’: Israelis cheer, cry as hostages freed from Gaza
https://arab.news/r5kwy
‘Welcome back’: Israelis cheer, cry as hostages freed from Gaza
- All three men were taken from Nir Oz, a kibbutz community near the Gaza border
- They watched the release from the town of Carmei Gat in southern Israel
Israeli troops killed 15 Palestinian medics and buried them in a mass grave, UN says
- Dead included 8 Red Crescent workers, 6 members of Civil Defense emergency unit and UNRWA staffer
DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip: Palestinians held funerals Monday for 15 medics and emergency responders killed by Israeli troops in southern Gaza, after their bodies and mangled ambulances were found buried in an impromptu mass grave, apparently plowed over by Israeli military bulldozers.
The Palestinian Red Crescent says the slain workers and their vehicles were clearly marked as medical and humanitarian personnel and accused Israeli troops of killing them “in cold blood.” The Israeli military says its troops opened fire on vehicles that approached them “suspiciously” without identification.
The dead included eight Red Crescent workers, six members of Gaza’s Civil Defense emergency unit and a staffer from UNRWA, the UN’s agency for Palestinians. The International Red Cross/Red Crescent said it was the deadliest attack on its personnel in eight years.
Since the war in Gaza began 18 months ago, Israel has killed more than 100 Civil Defense workers and more than 1,000 health workers, according to the UN
Here is what we know about what happened.
Missing for days
The emergency teams had been missing since March 23, when they went at around noon to retrieve casualties after Israeli forces launched an offensive into the Tel Al-Sultan district of the southern city of Rafah.
The military had called for an evacuation of the area earlier that day, saying Hamas militants were operating there. Alerts by the Civil Defense at the time said displaced Palestinians sheltering in the area had been hit and a team that went to rescue them was “surrounded by Israeli troops.”
“The available information indicates that the first team was killed by Israeli forces on 23 March,” the UN said in a statement Sunday night.
Further emergency teams that went to rescue the first team were “struck one after another over several hours,” it said. All the teams went out during daylight hours, according to the Civil Defense.
The Israeli military said Sunday that on March 23, troops opened fire on vehicles that were “advancing suspiciously” toward them without emergency signals.
It said “an initial assessment” determined that the troops killed a Hamas operative named Mohammed Amin Shobaki and eight other militants. Israel has struck ambulances and other emergency vehicles in the past, accusing Hamas militants of using them for transportation.
However, none of the dead staffers from the Red Crescent and Civil Defense had that name, and no other bodies were reported found at the site, raising questions over the military’s suggestion that alleged militants were among the rescue workers.
The military did not immediately respond to requests for the names of the other alleged militants killed or for comment on how the emergency workers came to be buried.
After a ceasefire that lasted roughly two months, Israel relaunched its military campaign in Gaza on March 18. Since then, bombardment and new ground assaults that have killed more than 1,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. The ministry’s count does not distinguish between militants and civilians, but it says over half those killed are women and children.
Aid workers say ambulance teams and humanitarian staff have come under fire in the renewed assault. A worker with the charity World Central Kitchen was killed Friday by an Israeli strike that hit next to a kitchen distributing free meals. A March 19 Israeli tank strike on a UN compound killed a staffer, the UN said, though Israel denies being behind the blast.
Mass grave
For days, Israeli forces would not allow access to the site where the emergency teams disappeared, the UN said.
On Wednesday, a UN convoy tried to reach the site but encountered Israeli troops opening fire on people.
The convoy saw a woman who had been shot lying in the road. The dashboard video shows staff talking about retrieving the woman. Then two people are seen walking across the road. Gunfire rings out and they flee. One stumbles, apparently wounded, before he is shot and falls onto his face to the ground. The UN said the team retrieved the body of the woman and left.
On Sunday, the UN said teams were able to reach the site after the Israeli military informed it where it had buried the bodies, in a barren area on the edges of Tel Al-Sultan. Footage released by the UN shows workers from PRCS and Civil Defense, wearing masks and bright orange vests, digging through hills of dirt that appeared to have been piled up by Israeli bulldozers.
The footage shows them digging out multiple bodies wearing orange emergency vests. Some of the bodies are found piled on top of each other. At one point, they pull out a body in a Civil Defense vest out of the dirt, and it is revealed to be a torso with no legs. Several ambulances and a UN vehicle, all heavily damaged or torn apart, are also buried in the dirt.
“Their bodies were gathered and buried in this mass grave,” said Jonathan Whittall, with the UN humanitarian office OCHA, speaking at the site in the video. “We’re digging them out in their uniforms, with their gloves on. They were here to save lives.”
“It’s absolute horror what has happened here,” he said.
Funerals
A giant crowd gathered on Monday outside the morgue of Nasser Hospital in the southern city of Khan Younis as the bodies of the eight slain PRCS workers were brought out for funerals. Their bodies were laid out on stretchers wrapped in white cloth with the Red Crescent logo on it and their photos, as family and others held funeral prayers over them. Funerals for the seven others followed.
“They were killed in cold blood by the Israeli occupation, despite the clear nature of their humanitarian mission,” Raed Al-Nimis, the Red Crescent spokesperson in Gaza, told the AP.
Israeli troops have killed at least 30 Red Crescent medics over the course of the war. Among them were two killed in February 2024 when they tried to rescue Hind Rajab, a 5-year-old girl who was killed along with six other relatives when they were trapped in their car under Israeli fire in northern Gaza.
From Geneva, the head of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, Jagan Chapagain, said the staffer killed last week “wore emblems that should have protected them; their ambulances were clearly marked.”
“All humanitarians must be protected,” he said.
UAE court sentences killers of Israeli-Moldovan to death
- Three defendants sentenced to death, fourth jailed for life
- Zvi Kogan’s body was found a few days after he disappeared in Dubai in November
LONDON: A court in the UAE has sentenced three people to death for the kidnap and murder of the Israeli-Moldovan man Zvi Kogan.
A fourth defendant was given a life sentence for being an accomplice to the killing in November, the UAE state news agency WAM reported on Monday.
The four defendants were “unanimously convicted” by the Abu Dhabi Federal Court of Appeals’ State Security Chamber for the “premeditated murder with terrorist intention” of Kogan.
The body of Kogan, 28, was found a few days after he went missing in Dubai. Within days, the UAE said it had arrested three Uzbek men as the main suspects and thanked Turkiye for helping to detain them.
Attorney General Hamad Saif Al-Shamsi said the verdict reflected the UAE’s “unwavering commitment to combating terrorism.”
He said the UAE judiciary confronts “any attempts to undermine national security and stability” and added that the Emirates is a global model of “coexistence and tolerance, where its laws protect all residents, regardless of religion or ethnicity, ensuring their safety and security.”
During their investigation, prosecutors found that the defendants had tracked and murdered Kogan.
The defendants gave detailed confessions and were also linked to the crime with forensic reports, the post-mortem examination, instruments used in the crime, and witness testimonies.
Hamas calls on ‘anyone who can bear arms’ worldwide to fight Trump’s Gaza plan
- Netanyahu said Israel was working toward a plan proposed by Trump to displace Gazans to other countries
CAIRO: A senior Hamas official on Monday called on supporters worldwide to pick up weapons and fight US President Donald Trump’s plan to relocate more than two million Gazans to neighboring countries such as Egypt and Jordan.
“In the face of this sinister plan — one that combines massacres with starvation — anyone who can bear arms, anywhere in the world, must take action,” Sami Abu Zuhri said in a statement.
“Do not withhold an explosive, a bullet, a knife, or a stone. Let everyone break their silence.”
Abu Zuhri’s call comes a day after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu offered to let Hamas leaders leave Gaza but demanded that the Palestinian militant group disarm in the final stages of the war in Gaza.
Hamas has expressed a willingness to relinquish Gaza’s administration, but has warned its weapons are a “red line.”
Netanyahu said Israel was working toward a plan proposed by Trump to displace Gazans to other countries.
Netanyahu said that after the war, Israel would ensure overall security in Gaza and “enable the implementation of the Trump plan” — which had initially called for the mass displacement of all 2.4 million people living in the Palestinian territory — calling it a “voluntary migration plan.”
Days after taking office in January, Trump floated a proposal to move Gaza’s population out of the war-battered territory, suggesting that Egypt or Jordan could take them in.
Both countries, along with other Arab allies, governments around the world and the Palestinians themselves, have flatly rejected the notion.
Trump later appeared to backtrack on the proposal, saying he was “not forcing” his widely condemned plan.
“Nobody’s expelling any Palestinians,” Trump said at the White House in mid-March, remarks welcomed by Egypt, Jordan and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).
Arab nations have since come up with an alternative plan for rebuilding the Gaza Strip without relocating its people, which would take place under the future administration of the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority.
For Palestinians, any attempts to force them out of Gaza would evoke dark memories of what the Arab world calls the “Nakba,” or catastrophe — the mass displacement of Palestinians during Israel’s creation in 1948.
Israel’s Defense Minister Israel Katz in February said that a special agency would be established for the “voluntary departure” of Gazans.
A defense ministry statement said an initial plan included “extensive assistance that will allow any Gaza resident who wishes to emigrate voluntarily to a third country to receive a comprehensive package, which includes, among other things, special departure arrangements via sea, air, and land.”
Israel resumed intense bombing of Gaza on March 18 and then launched a new ground offensive, ending a nearly two-month ceasefire in the war with Hamas.
Since the fighting restarted, the health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza says that at least 1,001 people have been killed.
The war was sparked by Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, which resulted in the deaths of 1,218 people, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.
Israel’s retaliatory military campaign has killed at least 50,357 people in Gaza, the majority of them civilians, according to the territory’s health ministry.
US airstrikes pound Yemen overnight, killing at least 3, Houthis say
- Strikes around Sanaa, Yemen’s capital, and Hajjah governorate also wounded 12
DUBAI: Suspected US airstrikes struck around Yemen’s Houthi-held capital overnight into Monday morning, attacks that the group said killed at least three people.
The full extent of the damage wasn’t immediately clear. The attacks followed a night of airstrikes early Friday that appeared particularly intense compared to other days in the campaign that began March 15.
The strikes around Sanaa, Yemen’s capital held by the Houthis since 2014, and Hajjah governorate also wounded 12 others, the rebels said.
Their Al-Masirah satellite news channel aired footage of broken glass littering homes in Sanaa after the concussive blast of the bombs, but continued not to show the targets of the attacks — suggesting the sites had a military or intelligence function. Strikes there killed one person, the Houthis said.
Another strike targeting a pickup truck in Hajjah killed two people and wounded a child, the Houthis said. It marked the first, publicly known time the American strikes targeted a vehicle in this campaign.
An Associated Press review has found the new American operation against the Houthis under President Donald Trump appears more extensive than those under former President Joe Biden, as the US moves from solely targeting launch sites to firing at ranking personnel as well as dropping bombs in cities.
The new campaign of airstrikes, which the Houthis now say have killed at least 61 people, started after the group threatened to begin targeting “Israeli” ships again over Israel blocking aid entering the Gaza Strip. The rebels in the past loosely defined what constitutes an Israeli ship, meaning other vessels could be targeted.
The Houthis had targeted over 100 merchant vessels with missiles and drones, sinking two vessels and killing four sailors from November 2023 until January of this year. They also launched attacks targeting American warships, though none has been hit so far.
The attacks greatly raised the Houthis’ profile as they faced economic problems and launched a crackdown targeting any dissent and aid workers at home amid Yemen’s decadelong stalemated war that has torn apart the Arab world’s poorest nation.
Syria president says new authorities can’t satisfy everyone
- President Ahmed Al-Sharaa announced transitional 23-member cabinet on Saturday
- Sharaa said the new government’s goal was rebuilding the country
DAMASCUS: Syria’s interim President Ahmed Al-Sharaa said Monday a new transitional government would aim for consensus in rebuilding the war-torn country but acknowledged it would be unable to satisfy everyone.
The transitional 23-member cabinet — without a prime minister — was announced Saturday, more than three months after Sharaa’s Islamist group Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS) led an offensive that toppled longtime president Bashar Assad.
The autonomous Kurdish-led administration in northeast Syria has rejected the government’s legitimacy, saying it “does not reflect the country’s diversity.”
Sharaa said the new government’s goal was rebuilding the country but warned that “will not be able to satisfy everyone.”
“Any steps we take will not reach consensus — this is normal — but we must reach a consensus” as much as possible, he told a gathering at the presidential palace broadcast on Syrian television after prayers for the Eid Al-Fitr Muslim holiday.
Authorities are seeking to reunite and rebuild the country and its institutions after nearly 14 years of civil war.
Some of Sharaa’s closest supporters and other figures aligned with him make up the majority of the new cabinet.
Sharaa said the ministers were chosen for their competence and expertise, “without particular ideological or political orientations.”
Most members are Sunni Muslim, reflecting the demographic make-up of Syria, ruled for decades by the Assad clan which belongs to the Alawite minority.
Amid international calls for an inclusive transition, the new government has four ministers from minority groups in Syria — a Christian, a Druze, a Kurd and an Alawite, none of whom were handed key portfolios.
Sharaa said the new government’s make-up took into consideration “the diversity of Syrian society” while rejecting a quota system for religious or ethnic minorities, instead opting for “participation.”
“A new history is being written for Syria... we are all writing it,” he told the gathering.
This month, Sharaa signed into force a constitutional declaration regulating the country’s transitional period, set for five years.
Some experts and rights groups have warned that it concentrates power in Sharaa’s hands and fails to include enough protections for minorities.
This month also saw the worst sectarian bloodshed since Assad’s overthrow, with civilian massacres in Alawite-majority areas.
Sharaa has previously vowed to prosecute those behind the “bloodshed of civilians” and set up a fact-finding committee.
