TIMES OF ISRAEL
Hamas released a propaganda video Monday showing three Israeli women held hostage by the terror group in the Gaza Strip berating Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, calling on him to secure their release and accusing him of failing to prevent the terror group’s October 7 brutal onslaught.
It was unclear when or where the video of the women, whose statement was almost certainly dictated by their captors, was filmed.
Shortly after the video’s publication, the Prime Minister’s Office identified the women as Danielle Aloni, Rimon Buchshtab Kirsht and Lena Trupanov, and their families announced they would hold a press conference in the evening.
Aloni was kidnapped by Palestinian terrorists from Kibbutz Nir Oz, along with her daughter Emilia, 6. Her sister and brother-in-law and their twin 3-year-old daughters were also taken into Gaza as hostages.
Trupanov, her son Sasha and her mother Irena were likewise kidnapped from Nir Oz, while her husband Vitali was killed by terrorists.
Kirsht and her partner Yagev Buchshtab were seized at their home in Kibbutz Nirim.
The three were among at least 243 hostages dragged into the Strip by Hamas and allied terror factions during the shock assault on southern Israel three weeks ago, when some 2,500 terrorists stormed across the Gaza frontier in a multipronged attack and killed over 1,400 people, most of them civilians slaughtered in their homes and at an outdoor music festival.
The captives, also mainly civilians, include women, the elderly and children, some still in diapers. It is not clear how many of them are alive.
Since the October 7 attack, Hamas has released four hostages — an American-Israeli mother and daughter and two elderly Israeli women — in moves brokered by Qatar, which hosts both a US military base and Hamas’s political bureau.
In response to the massacres, Israel has vowed to destroy Hamas, which rules Gaza, and to pursue every avenue to secure freedom for all of the hostages. Alongside intense strikes, the Israel Defense Forces has sent troops and tanks into the Gaza Strip, but has limited its ground offensive, apparently in order to avoid endangering efforts to free the hostages.
As the IDF has intensified its operation in Gaza, Hamas is thought to be employing various psychological techniques to sow division and weaken Israelis’ resolve, while using the negotiations for the release of the captives it is holding to buy time and resources for its military campaign.
A statement from the Prime Minister’s Office denounced the hostage video released Monday as “cruel psychological propaganda” by Hamas.
“I embrace you. My heart is with you and the rest of the captives,” Netanyahu was quoted as saying, addressing the hostages’ families. “We are doing everything to bring home all the captives and those missing.”
