Israel must investigate how these three Israelis died in Hamas tunnels in Gaza

The funeral of Israeli soldier Ron Sherman, January 2024

The Haaretz lead editorial on 22 January 2024:

On December 14, the Israel Defense Forces recovered from a tunnel in Jabalya the bodies of three Israelis who had been abducted to the Gaza Strip on October 7 – soldiers Ron Sherman and Nick Beiser, and Elia Toledano, a civilian. About a month later, the army gave their families the pathology report and a report on how the bodies were found. These raise tough and troubling questions that require explanations and public exposure.

These questions were raised in all their gravity by Dr. Maayan Sherman, Ron’s mother, who is a veterinarian. In a Facebook post, she accused the IDF of killing her son when it pumped poison gas into the tunnel in which the hostages were held and served as “human shields” for Ahmed Ghandour, a senior Hamas commander.

“The inquiry’s findings: Ron was indeed murdered,” she wrote. “Not by Hamas … not by stray bullets and not in an exchange of fire. This was deliberate murder. Bombing with poison gas … Oh yes, and they found that Ron also had several crushed fingers, apparently due to his desperate attempts to escape the poison grave.”

Her son, she continued, “was abducted due to the criminal negligence of all the senior figures in the army and this rotten government, who gave the order to kill him to settle a score with some bloodthirsty, but also really stupid, terrorist named Ghandour from Jabalya.”

IDF Spokesperson Daniel Hagari responded evasively. He said it wasn’t possible to determine what killed the three hostages, “and at this point, we can neither deny nor confirm that they were killed due to suffocation, strangulation, poisoning, the effects of the IDF attack or Hamas action.” This evasive response was apparently meant to silence the discussion and create doubts about the family’s claims, without denying them directly or getting into a fight with bereaved parents.

We must not accept this evasiveness. What Maayan Sherman wrote following the detailed briefing she was given by the army’s representatives cannot remain unanswered. And even if the army didn’t act this way in the case of Ron Sherman, the following questions must be answered. Did the IDF use poison gas in Gaza to kill people in the tunnels? And if it did use such a tactic, is this legal under the laws of war, to which Israel is committed? And if such a tactic was used, who gave the approval for its use?

In addition, are the hostages’ lives considered at all when decisions are made about the tunnels, or is the only consideration the operational need to strike at Hamas operatives?

All these questions must be investigated by an outside body – one that will receive all the necessary information from the army and the government and present its conclusions to the public. We cannot wait until after the war ends to carry out this vital investigation.

This article is reproduced in its entirety