“PARADING OF BODIES”
The six Israelis released on Saturday were the last group of living hostages set to be freed under the truce’s first phase.
At a ceremony in Nuseirat, central Gaza, hostages Eliya Cohen, 27, Omer Shem Tov, 22, and Israeli-Argentine Omer Wenkert, 23, waved from a stage, flanked by masked Hamas militants, before being transferred to the Red Cross.
“I saw the look on his face. He’s calm, he knows he’s coming back home … He’s a real hero,” said Wenkert’s friend Rory Grosz.
In Rafah, southern Gaza, militants handed over Tal Shoham, 40, and Avera Mengistu, 38.
A sixth hostage, Hisham al-Sayed, 37, was later released in private and taken back to Israeli territory, the military said.
Sayed, a Bedouin Muslim, and Mengistu, an Ethiopian Jew, had been held in Gaza for about a decade after they entered the territory individually.
Hamas said they freed Sayed in private to “honour and respect” Palestinians inside Israel.
On Thursday, the first transfer of dead hostages under the truce sparked anger in Israel after analysis concluded that captive Shiri Bibas’s remains were not among the four bodies returned.
UN human rights chief Volker Turk condemned the “parading of bodies” during a ceremony in which coffins, with pictures of the dead attached, were displayed on a slogan-bedecked stage.
Bibas and her two young sons became symbols of Israel’s hostage ordeal.
Hamas admitted a possible “mix-up of bodies”, and late on Friday handed over more human remains, which the Bibas family said had been identified as the mother’s.
Hamas has long maintained that an Israeli air strike killed Bibas and her sons.
Forensics expert Chen Kugel, however, said an autopsy of their remains found “no evidence of injuries caused by a bombing”.
