Israeli army said the remains of two child captives were identified but another body released by Hamas was not the boys’ mother or any other captive.
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has accused Hamas of committing a “cruel and evil” violation of the Gaza ceasefire deal as he claimed that one of the bodies returned on Thursday was not of the female captive Shiri Bibas.
Earlier, the Israeli army said the remains of two child captives were identified but another body released by Hamas was not the boys’ mother or any other captive.
Hamas handed over the bodies of four people who were taken captive during its October 2023 attack on southern Israel, under the ceasefire agreement that has paused more than 15 months of war.
The remains of Ariel and Kfir Bibas were identified by the National Institute of Forensic Medicine and Israel Police afterwards, but the army said early on Friday that the third body was not that of their mother Shiri Bibas or any other captive.
The fourth body was that of Oded Lifshitz, who was 83 when he was taken captive.
“We demand that Hamas return Shiri home along with all our hostages,” the army said.
Later on Friday, Netanyahu issued a threat to Hamas, saying, “We will act with determination to bring Shiri home along with all our hostages – both living and dead – and ensure Hamas pays the full price for this cruel and evil violation of the agreement.”
There has been no comment from Hamas yet on Israeli claims. The Palestinian group has maintained that the deceased captives handed over on Thursday were killed in an Israeli air attack during the war, but Israel says they were killed by Hamas in November 2023.
Al Jazeera’s Nour Odeh, reporting from Amman in Jordan, said the Bibas family was not captured by Hamas but by a smaller, lesser-known group.
“It is unclear how this could have happened, and we wait to see what kind of reaction in the morning we get from Hamas,” Odeh said.
It also remains unclear whether the next swap, scheduled for Saturday, will take place following the allegations.
There has been “tremendous public anger whipped up inside Israel” over the controversy of the bodies, according to Mohamad Bazzi, an associate professor at New York University.
He told Al Jazeera that the Israeli right wing had seized on the moment to press for a return to war.
But it would be “quite something” for Netanyahu to restart fighting and jeopardise further releases of captives by abandoning the ceasefire deal now, Bazzi said.
