2023-10-12 04:28:32
The Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas claimed in a statement on Wednesday evening that it had released an Israeli woman and her two children, with Israeli media calling it a hoax.
“Israeli settler woman and her two children released following being detained during clashes” between the movement and the Israeli army, indicated the armed wing of Hamas without specifying the date of their release. A video broadcast immediately by Al-Aqsa TV, the Hamas channel, shows a woman in a blue shirt during the day with two children and three armed men walking away from a barbed wired area which appears to be the fence erected by Israel around the Gaza Strip. No military presence is visible in these images.
Israeli public television subsequently affirmed that these images showed people who “had never been taken to Gaza“. The local press explains that it is Avital Aladjem, a resident of kibbutz Holit who, according to the story she gave in a series of interviews, had been taken by force on Saturday by Hamas men with two of a neighbor’s children to the border area between Israel and the Gaza Strip following the unprecedented assault launched by hundreds of fighters from the Islamist movement on the south of the country.
Avital Aladjem said that her captors had left her free to leave with the little ones at the fence. As the scale of the atrocities committed by Hamas during Saturday’s extremely violent assault begins to emerge, from testimonies collected from survivors, the Islamist movement, described as terrorist by the European Union and the United States, denies having committed abuses once morest civilians, and accuses “Western media” to relay false accusations.
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