Red Cross says its staff in Gaza

The Red Cross told News themezone on Wednesday that its staff in Gaza “were unable to intervene directly on the scene” when suspected Hamas members were seen burying and then uncovering the remains of a deceased hostage in the Palestinian territory earlier this week.

The Israel Defense Forces released a video on Tuesday that they said showed the incident.

The Red Cross said it was “raising its concerns directly with the parties.”

The video, which appears to have been filmed by an IDF drone, shows masked men, some in military uniform and others in civilian clothes, carrying a shrouded body out of a building near the Shejaiya neighborhood of Gaza City and carrying it to a large adjacent pit, before burying it by hand under rocks and soil.

An excavator is then shown lifting the body and a quantity of earth and carrying it towards the front of the building, where it remained until three people in red ICRC vests arrived.

The three people wearing ICRC vests remained at the scene while the men removed the body from the bulldozer, placed it on a large mound of earth and buried it a second time.

Several minutes later, the video, which had been edited, shows a man with a shovel partially uncovering the body while three people in red ICRC vests look on.

A man identified by the IDF as a photographer appears to film the second discovery of the body, while the three apparent ICRC representatives stand near a road a short distance from the scene.

News themezone has verified the video’s location in Gaza City, but was unable to independently verify the date or time the video was filmed or the identities of the masked men in the video. The video released by the IDF also includes several edits, where video clips were stitched together.

The IDF accused Hamas of “trying to create a false impression of efforts to locate the bodies, while in reality holding deceased hostages whose remains they refuse to release as the agreement requires.”

His family later identified the remains as belonging to Ofir Tzarfati. Israeli officials had said that his body had previously been recovered in Gaza during a military operation shortly after the start of the war, before these additional remains were handed over.

In a statement shared by a group representing families of Israeli hostages on Tuesday, the Tzarfati family said Hamas had inflicted a deception “on our family as we try to heal.”

“This morning we were shown video footage of our beloved son’s remains being removed, buried and handed over to the Red Cross – an abhorrent manipulation designed to sabotage the agreement and abandon the effort to bring all the hostages home,” the family said.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office criticized Hamas for handing over Tzarfati’s remains, instead of one of the 13 deceased hostages who are still missing in gazacalling it “a clear violation of the agreement” negotiated by President Trump to stop the two-year war.

The IDF said it had recorded Hamas operatives on Monday “removing body parts from a structure that had been prepared in advance and burying them nearby,” and then staging “a fake display of the discovery of the body of a deceased hostage.”

“ICRC staff were not aware that the human remains shown in the video in the mouth of an excavator had been previously prepared,” the global charity told News themezone in a statement on Wednesday, highlighting that the recovery of human remains “is the responsibility of the parties under international humanitarian law, and ICRC staff are not involved in the recovery.”

The charity, which has helped facilitate the transfer of the remains of Israeli hostages from Gaza to Israel, said in a statement shared with News themezone early Wednesday that its team members who appear in the IDF video “were not aware that a deceased person had been placed there prior to their arrival, as seen in the footage. In general, our role as a neutral intermediary does not include the disinterment of the bodies of the deceased.”

Israel’s Foreign Ministry said on social media that it “appreciated the Red Cross’s condemnation of Hamas-organized ‘burials’ and ‘discoveries’ of hostage corpses (which they previously removed from Hamas holding sites),” but added: “There appears to be a gap between what the Red Cross office knows and reality, given images of Red Cross personnel in the hoax. We trust that the @ICRC will take action regarding the lies that your staff apparently reports upwards.”