The soldiers did not know of their presence; the army’s policy is not to send troops to areas that intelligence indicates may hold live hostages.
By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News
The IDF’s initial investigation into the murder of the six hostages found on Saturday revealed that Hamas observers had watched army forces approaching, which led to the cold-blooded execution, Channel 11 reported Tuesday.
The probe discovered indications that terrorists had stood outside the Rafah tunnel in which Ori Danino, Carmel Gat, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Alexander Lobanov, Almog Sarus, and Eden Yerushalmi were being held.
When they saw that the soldiers were working their way in their direction, the captors shot their victims in the head before fleeing.
Due to the concern about just such a scenario, the IDF had put in place the policy that soldiers were not to maneuver in areas where there was intelligence information that there were possibly live hostages, said the report.
Such information is passed on to the men in the field in real time. In this case there was no such warning, so the soldiers could not know that there were any hostages in their specific arena of operations, with Hamas terrorists watching them closely as they proceeded.
The report noted that the findings accord well with what happened in Khan Younis last month. Then, the IDF found the bodies of four terrorists close to shafts that led to a tunnel in which the bodies of Yagev Buchshtav, Alex Dancyg, Yoram Metzger, Avraham Munder, Chaim Peri, and Nadav Popplewell were discovered.
The terrorists had been killed in an IDF airstrike, and the IDF encountered no resistance when entering that tunnel, although constant fighting was going on in the area.
At least some of the six had also been executed by gunfire by their captors, just as occurred in Rafah.
Hamas announced Tuesday on the social media channel Telegram that ever since IDF special forces rescued four hostages alive in Nuseirat in June, it had ordered a new policy of killing hostages if IDF soldiers are seen approaching a place where they are hidden.
The terrorists in Rafah thus did not need to receive any specific order or act on their own recognizance when executing their prisoners.
The bodies were found lying one next to the other in a tunnel some 20 meters underground, the depth of a six-to-seven story building, located in a built-up area of the town that sits on the Egyptian-Gazan border.
According to the Institute of Forensic Medicine, they were each shot multiple times between Thursday evening to Friday morning. They were discovered on Saturday.