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Video posted to the messaging app Telegram earlier Saturday and verified by The Occasions confirmed armed militants crouching and taking on positions outdoors buildings in Be’eri. Some individuals have additionally posted appeals on social media asking for assist finding associates and family members from Be’eri and the encompassing areas who haven’t been heard from since Saturday morning native time.
Be’eri is one in every of a number of cities within the space wherein gunfire has been reported since Saturday’s incursion started, and Admiral Hagari mentioned preventing was nonetheless underway there as of early night.
On the similar time, a senior U.N. official and a diplomat accustomed to the matter mentioned the United Nations had confirmed the presence of Israeli civilian and army hostages contained in the Gaza Strip. Abu Obeida, a spokesman for Hamas’s armed wing, claimed in a press release on the Telegram messaging app that the militant group had hidden “dozens of hostages” in “protected locations and the tunnels of the resistance.”
The difficulty of Israelis in captivity is a deeply emotional and explosive one in Israel, with the federal government having paid a excessive value up to now for the return of its residents or of the stays of troopers in lopsided prisoner trade offers.
In 2006, Gaza militants seized an Israeli hostage — the soldier Gilad Shalit — from the Israeli aspect of the border fence. Hamas, the Islamic militant group, held Mr. Shalit for 5 years till he was exchanged for greater than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners from Israeli prisons, a lot of them convicted of lethal terrorist assaults in opposition to Israelis. The group has additionally been holding the stays of two Israeli troopers killed within the 2014 conflict. Two Israeli residents who had crossed by foot into Gaza are presumed to be alive.
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