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.
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