2024-01-27T15:42:37+00:00
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/ The mother of an Israeli soldier, who was among the hostages kidnapped by Hamas on October 7, accused the Israeli authorities of presenting an incorrect account of the real reason that led to his death, according to the Haaretz newspaper.
The Israeli army announced last month that it had recovered the body of Sergeant Ron Sherman, 19, from a tunnel in the Jabalia camp in the Gaza Strip, along with the bodies of another soldier and a civilian, near the spot where the commander of Hamas’s northern brigade in Gaza, Ahmed al-Ghandour, was killed.
The Israeli military said at the time that the three Israelis were killed by Hamas militants, but Sherman’s mother, Mayan, believes that account is incorrect.
Mayan says the authorities initially handed her son’s body over to her, who buried it in a military cemetery.
She added that the coroner visited her after that and told her that the army did not perform an autopsy on the body, but they did a CT scan and examined it carefully and did not find anything that clearly indicated the cause of death. No injuries, no traces of gunshots or knife wounds, no shrapnel, no fractures or external injuries, and no signs of strangulation or injury from an explosion, according to the newspaper.
“We received a detailed report, and for me as a mother it was really shocking, because by that time the body was a month old, but the cause of death had not been found,” Mayan said.
As a result, Mayan accused the authorities of killing her son and abandoning him twice: the first time “because of her responsibility for the October 7 attack, and the second time because she abandoned the hostages in the Gaza Strip.”
Mayan believes that the Israeli army may have been involved in the killing of her son and the other two hostages in order to kill Hamas leader Ahmed al-Ghandour.
In a post on her Facebook page, Mayan accused the Israeli army of “killing her son with poisonous gas” by pumping him into the tunnel where Hamas used hostages as human shields to protect Al-Ghandour.
The Israeli woman wrote in the post that “the results of the investigation prove that Ron was indeed killed, not by Hamas, not by stray bullets, and not in an exchange of fire. This was a deliberate killing using poison gas.”
She added that a source in the Israeli army admitted that this was one of the possible possibilities for the killing of the three hostages.
According to the newspaper, Hamas had published a video clip a few days after the bodies were recovered, showing the three hostages still alive, indicating that they died during the Israeli army’s bombing of Jabalia.
The newspaper added that the Israeli army investigation, whose findings were presented to the family last week, indicated that “it cannot be ruled out or confirmed that the hostages were killed by suffocation, strangulation, poisoning, or as a result of an Israeli army attack or Hamas action.”
The newspaper reported that Mayan was told during a meeting with the head of the Prisoners and Missing Persons Center, reserve general Nitzan Alon, that the Israeli army did not use illegal bombs.
However, she adds, Alon explained that there is a possibility that the hostages died from inhaling toxic gas resulting from a secondary chemical reaction of ordinary bombs.
“We need to wait for the results of the toxicology test, which could take a few months,” he said, according to the newspaper, noting that he “did not deny the possibility that lack of oxygen was the cause of death.”