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Israel has said its decision to launch deadly airstrikes on Gaza overnight was in response to Hamas violations of a cease-fire deal — an agreement that hinged heavily on the return of hostages’ bodies.
Since the fragile truce took hold three weeks ago, Israel has repeatedly accused Hamas of delaying the return of the remains. Hamas has insisted that it is working in good faith to recover the bodies, but says it cannot go faster because of conditions on the ground in Gaza, which has been decimated by two years of war.
On Tuesday, Israel’s military released a nearly 15-minute drone video that it said showed Hamas members staging the discovery of a deceased captive amid the ruins as observers from the Red Cross watched. The New York Times analyzed the footage and compared it with recent satellite imagery of the location and photos taken in the area.
In the video, three men, their faces covered, can be seen carrying what appears to be a white body bag out of a damaged building and placing it in what satellite images analyzed by the Times confirm was a freshly dug pit.
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The three men then use shovels to bury the bag with dirt and place large rocks over it, covering it entirely, as a fourth man, dressed in black, looks on from the edge of the pit.
Inside the bag were the partial remains of Ofir Tzarfati, 27, according to the Israeli government.
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An excavator then arrives, and the fourth man jumps into the cab of the vehicle. The excavator moves into the pit to dig up the same spot where moments earlier the white bag was buried. It unearths the white bag, carrying it to a mound of dirt nearby.
The Times confirmed the video was filmed in the Tuffah neighborhood of Gaza City, and satellite imagery confirmed that dirt was moved from the area between Monday and Tuesday. The Israeli military said the video was recorded on Monday.
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Three Red Cross representatives arrive to examine the white bag, which the men pull from the bucket of the excavator and place on the mound of dirt.
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Then the excavator dumps another pile of dirt on top of the bag, covering it, before men with shovels start digging into the pile. They pause to let the excavator back in, then dig again — a sequence that repeats — before the bag is eventually unearthed again.
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It was not immediately clear why the bag was reburied and unearthed, or how that was explained to the Red Cross representatives present.
The Red Cross said that its teams were “under constant pressure to take part in operations and do so in good faith in a highly volatile and challenging operating environment.”
“Due to these complexities, the team present was not able to intervene directly on-site,” the statement added.
The Red Cross said its staff was unaware that a body had been moved before their arrival.
“Our team only observed what appeared to be the recovery of remains without prior knowledge of the circumstances leading up to it,” the aid organization said in a statement. “It is unacceptable that a fake recovery was staged.”
Before the drone footage ends, one of the men previously seen shoveling dirt in the pit appears to take photographs or videos with his phone of the partially unearthed white bag.
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Some of Mr. Tzarfati’s remains had been recovered by Israel earlier in the war. The remains seen in the video were handed back to Israel on Monday. Hamas has so far returned about half of the roughly two dozen bodies of captives still in the enclave.
The video, Israel’s military said, shows that Hamas is trying “to create a false impression” of efforts to locate the hostages bodies.
When asked about the video, Hamas referred The Times on Tuesday to an earlier statement in which it accused Israel of “seeking to fabricate false pretexts” for military action that would violate the cease-fire agreement.”
Not long after, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the Israeli military to carry out “forceful strikes” in the Gaza Strip that local health officials said killed at least 100 people. Those strikes were in response to what his government said were Hamas violations of the cease-fire deal. Among those violations, a spokesman for Mr. Netanyahu said, were the events depicted in the video.
Aric Toler is a reporter on the Visual Investigations team at The Times who uses emerging techniques of discovery to analyze open source information.
Monika Čvorak is a senior video journalist based in London.
Liam Stack is a Times reporter who covers the culture and politics of the New York City region.
