Eden Yerushalmi, a Slain Israeli Hostage, Is Seen in Hamas Video
Ms. Yerushalmi, 24, was one of six captives whose bodies the Israeli military recovered from Gaza over the weekend. It was not clear when the video was taken.
Hamas on Monday released a video of a hostage who was taken from Israel on Oct. 7 and was one of six slain captives the Israeli military said it recovered on Sunday, spurring protests and labor strikes across the country.
The roughly two-minute video appears to show Eden Yerushalmi, 24, who had been working as a bartender at the Nova music festival in southern Israel on Oct. 7 when the militant group attacked. It is not clear when the video was filmed.
The Israeli health ministry said on Sunday that the six hostages it recovered from a tunnel in Gaza were shot at close range sometime between Thursday and Friday morning, according to a forensic examination.
In the video, Ms. Yerushalmi expressed her love for her parents and two sisters and said she missed them. Her eyes were rimmed by dark circles. Her speech was animated.
Rights groups and international law experts say that a hostage video is, by definition, made under duress, and that the statements in it are usually coerced. Israeli officials have called the videos a form of “psychological warfare,” and experts say their production can constitute a war crime.
The circumstances of how the video was filmed were unclear, and the footage appears to have been edited. It was released on Hamas’s social media channels at about 10 p.m. in Israel. Earlier on Monday, Hamas released an edited video of all six slain hostages, suggesting that more videos would be published in the coming hours or days.
Following the video’s release on the messaging app Telegram, the Yerushalmi family issued a brief statement through the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, which represents relatives of the captives, calling the video a “shocking psychological terror video that Hamas published.”
Responding to her comments in the video, the family said: “Our Eden, we love you, too, and we miss you like crazy. You are forever in our hearts.”
On the day she was abducted, Ms. Yerushalmi sent her family a video of rocket fire from the Nova music festival, saying she was leaving the event, and also called the police, pleading with them to find her, according to a statement on Sunday from the Hostages and Missing Families Forum.
For four hours during the attack, Ms. Yerushalmi stayed in phone contact with her sisters, the statement said, and the last words they heard were, “They’ve caught me.”
In November, Ms. Yerushalmi’s sisters lit candles for her in New York City at the gravesite of a major spiritual leader in Judaism. They giggled at the time, trying to explain her nickname — “Opossum” — an old inside joke the sisters could no longer recall. Relatives of Ms. Yerushalmi had also traveled to Paris and Washington to press for the release of the hostages.
In a video posted in April, Ms. Yerushalmi’s sisters said she was a waitress in Tel Aviv who loved to make TikTok videos, rode a motorcycle and was “always the life of the party.”
“She’s very friendly,” they said in another video, posted in July. “She lives life to the fullest.”
Ephrat Livni is a reporter for The Times’s DealBook newsletter, based in Washington. More about Ephrat Livni
Our Coverage of the Middle East Crisis
An Israeli Presence Postwar?: Gaza cease-fire talks have stalled again, in part over Israel’s demand to retain a military presence in the territory, which Hamas and Egypt oppose. But the view among some Gazans on that point is less clear-cut.
Israel's Many Wars: While the war with Hamas in Gaza attracts the most attention, Israel is also battling along its border with Lebanon, waging a counterinsurgency in the occupied West Bank and exchanging sporadic fire with Iran and its regional proxies.
Netanyahu Digs In: In his first news conference since the bodies of six killed hostages were recovered, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel refused to budge on his conditions for any truce in Gaza.
Biden’s Terse Rebuke: President Biden, when asked whether Netanyahu was doing enough to secure a deal to free hostages in Gaza, responded simply: “No.”
The Hostages Still in Gaza: Dozens of hostages abducted in the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack on Israel remain in captivity, according to the Israeli authorities. Here is what we know about them.
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