(JNS) The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have recovered the bodies of two Israeli woman kidnapped and killed by Hamas.
IDF soliders recovered the body of Cpl. Noa Marciano, who was abducted from Kibbutz Nahal Oz, where she served as a lookout. Marciano, 19, was a resident of Modi’in in central Israel.
Troops found her body in a building adjacent to Shifa Hospital in Gaza City and returned it to Israel for identification.
On Monday night, Hamas released a video of Marciano that the military described as “psychological terror.” The video claimed that she was killed in an airstrike in Gaza.
The next morning, the IDF said the 19-year-old had already died in captivity.
“After analyzing the footage, experts suggest that her injuries do not align with those typically sustained in airstrikes,” the IDF said in a statement. “The observed wounds appear more consistent with bullet injuries, and there is also an indication that she may have suffered from injuries related to a fall from a height.”
On Thursday night, the IDF also announced that soldiers had located and recovered the body of Yehudit Weiss, 65, from a building near Shifa Hospital.
Weiss, a mother and grandmother, was undergoing treatment for breast cancer when she was taken. Her husband, Shmulik, was murdered by Hamas when they raided the couple’s safe room in Kibbutz Be’eri.
Hamas terrorists kidnapped both Marciano and Weiss during their October 7 massacre of 1,200 people in southwestern Israel.
In recent weeks, Israel has provided extensive evidence that Hamas uses hospitals, mosques, schools and other civilian sites for their terror warfare against Israel and that the terror group has a command centre in the tunnel system underneath Shifa.
Earlier on Thursday, Dr Muhammad Abu-Salamiyyah, director of Shifa, told Al Jazeera that “the IDF forces collected bodies from the hospital.”
Asked about the claim at the press conference, IDF Spokesperson Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said: “We are working in Shifa Hospital for 48 hours. It’s a complex operation. It’s a large complex.
“In the operation, we found underground [infrastructure], weapons and we found information relating to the hostages. Next to the hospital, we found Yehudit Weiss."
“We will continue to update when we have confirmed information on all the additional achievements of the operation, and we hope for additional achievements,” added Hagari.
“Until then, we must wait and be patient.”
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