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The family of slain Israeli hostage Eden Yerushalmi has allowed the publication of a video clip of their daughter filmed while she was being held by Hamas terrorists.
“I love you and miss you,” she tells her family in the clip, as reported by Ynetnews.
The 24-year-old from Tel Aviv had been tending bar at the Nova music festival near Gaza when the October 7 massacre began. She hid among the bodies of her friends and then moved to hide beneath bushes, but was captured and taken to Gaza.
She had been in contact by phone with her sisters until she told them she had been caught. “She was not hurt when they took her, she did not have a scratch,” they said.
Eden was found shot in the back of the head in a Hamas tunnel on Thursday and returned to Israel along with five other hostages who had all been executed.
“We prayed. We wanted to believe this was not true,” her mother said at her funeral on Sunday. “This is not how I imagined your end. I wanted you back alive. I apologize that we were not able to save you.”
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Hamas threatens to release final messages of slain hostages
Hamas has threatened to release a video showing the “last messages” of the six murdered hostages recorded sometime prior to their deaths last week, the Jewish Chronicle reports.
A brief teaser posted by the terror group to the social media app Telegram on Monday showed each of the six hostages – Eden Yerushalmi, 24, Ori Danino, 25, Almog Sarusi, 27, Alexander Lobanov, 32, Carmel Gat, 40, and Hersh Goldberg-Polin, 23 – introducing themselves to the camera before a line appears on the screen in Hebrew, English and Arabic: “Hours and we will show their last messages.”
It is not known when the videos were recorded, but the video was shared around the time of the funerals for the hostages, which took place on Sunday and Monday.
Hamas has released similar propaganda videos of hostages in what Israel calls psychological warfare. In April, Hamas shared a video of Goldberg-Polin, proving that the American-Israeli was still alive 200 days after being kidnapped from the Nova music festival on October 7.
Hamas says hostage guards operating under new instructions
The armed wing of Hamas said on Monday that since June the group has been operating under new instructions on how to handle hostages should Israeli forces approach their locations in Gaza, according to Reuters.
The announcement comes days after Israeli Defence Forces recovered the bodies of six hostages from a tunnel in the southern Gaza city of Rafah, and said they had been killed by their captors as Israeli forces got close.
Abu Ubaida, spokesperson for Hamas’ al-Qassam Brigades, did not provide details on the instructions but said his group holds Israel responsible for the hostages’ deaths.
The new instructions, he said, were given to guards after a rescue operation by Israel in June. At that time, Israeli forces freed four hostages in a raid in which dozens of Palestinians were killed.
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