La Jornada – Hamas claims to have released three Israeli hostages

episode. The Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) announced on Wednesday that it had released an Israeli hostage and her two children after they were captured in the attack it launched on Saturday against Israel from the Gaza Strip.

A statement issued by the military wing of the Hamas movement, which has ruled the Gaza Strip since 2007, said that “an Israeli settler and her two children were released after being detained during confrontations” between the Palestinian movement and the Israeli army.

The Hebrew army did not confirm this information when consulted by Agence France-Presse.

A video broadcast by Al-Aqsa TV, affiliated with the Hamas movement, a short time later shows a woman wearing a blue shirt, two children and three armed men walking away from an area of ​​barbed wire that appears to be the fence that Israel has erected around the West Bank. Gaza strip.

But Israeli public television later noted that the images showed people who “were never transferred to Gaza.”

The local press indicated that Avital Al-Ajam, a resident of Kibbutz Holit, was the one who, according to the story she told in several interviews, was forcefully taken on Saturday by Hamas men with the two children of a neighbor to the area. Israel and the Gaza Strip after the attack that occurred on Saturday in the south of the country.

Al-Ajam said that her kidnappers left her free to go out with the children to the fence.

Dozens of Israelis and foreigners, including soldiers, civilians, children and women, are believed to remain in Hamas hands in the Gaza Strip since Saturday’s attack.

The Israeli authorities counted 150 hostages, while hundreds of people are still missing and their bodies are still being identified.

So far there has been no official statement.