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Three Bodies Found Believed to Be Missing Israelis Discovery Ends Israel’s Search For 3 Teenagers
(about 3 hours later)
JERUSALEM — Israeli searchers on Monday found three bodies believed to be those of the missing Israeli teenagers who were abducted more than two weeks ago in the occupied West Bank, setting off a new crisis with the Palestinians and raising the risk of further violent confrontations. JERUSALEM — Israel’s intense 18-day search for three abducted teenagers ended Monday when three bodies were found buried under a pile of rocks in an open field about 15 miles from where the youths were last seen in the occupied West Bank. A nation that had been enmeshed in hopeful prayer was instantly engulfed by a mix of grief and anger and vowed retaliation against the militant Palestinian group Hamas, which Israel says was behind the kidnapping.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu convened an emergency cabinet meeting as calls for a tough response escalated. The Israeli military sealed off the Hebron homes of the two Palestinian suspects it has said were responsible for the abductions, and witnesses said both homes were destroyed. Clashes between Palestinians and Israeli settlers in the Hebron area erupted in the hours after the discovery of the bodies was announced. “They were kidnapped and murdered in cold blood by beasts,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said at the start of an emergency cabinet meeting Monday night. “Hamas is responsible, and Hamas will pay.”
“With very heavy sorrow we found three bodies this evening and all the signs point to them being the bodies of our three kidnapped youths,” Mr. Netanyahu said. Just after midnight, witnesses in the West Bank city of Hebron said the retaliation had begun as Israeli forces used explosives to demolish the homes of Marwan Qawasmeh and Amer Abu Aisha, the Hamas men who have been missing as long as the teenagers and are Israel’s prime suspects.
Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, a senior spokesman for the Israeli military, said the three bodies were found at 5 p.m. “under a pile of rocks in an open field” between Halhul and Beit Kahil, two Palestinian towns near Hebron. The location was an area that thousands of soldiers had been scouring for more than a week. The bodies “are being transferred for forensic identification,” Colonel Lerner said, declining to say whether they were clothed or otherwise contained visual clues of identity. “We have informed the families that we found the bodies and that final identification is pending.” Mr. Qawasmeh’s mother, Amneh Hijazi Qawasmeh, 48, said that the suspect’s pregnant wife and 2-month-old nephew were lightly wounded in the blast.
The disappearances set off an uproar in Israel and deeply aggravated the already strained relations between the Israelis and the Palestinian Authority, even though it had deployed its own security forces to help with the search. The June 12 abduction and its aftermath, after April’s collapse of American-brokered peace talks, have sent the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to its lowest point in nearly a decade and shaken the fragile reconciliation between the Palestine Liberation Organization and Hamas.
The Palestinian Authority had just taken steps to form a unity government backed by Hamas, the militant group that controls the Gaza Strip. Israeli officials, who have rejected that government, have identified as prime suspects two Palestinians from Hebron that they say are affiliated with Hamas. Israel’s crackdown in the West Bank prompted outcries of collective punishment as thousands of homes were searched, 400 Palestinians — including many of Hamas’s top leaders — were arrested, and five were killed while hurling stones at soldiers or otherwise confronting them. A parallel escalation ensued in the Gaza Strip, where militants fired rockets daily into Israel’s south, and Israel’s retaliatory airstrikes killed three suspected militants.
Hamas did not take responsibility, but praised the abductions and bitterly criticized the Palestinian Authority for cooperating in the search. At one point, Palestinians smashed several of the authority’s police cars and stormed its police station in the central square of Ramallah, where it is based. The crisis has weakened President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority, who condemned the kidnapping and deployed his security forces to cooperate with Israel’s hunt. Hamas leaders ridiculed Mr. Abbas as a traitor, and a Palestinian mob smashed four of the authority’s police cars and stormed its police station in Ramallah’s central square. Israel, meanwhile, said Mr. Abbas’s words were meaningless unless he severed the pact with Hamas.
The intensity and scope of the Israeli security operation to find the missing teenagers was the biggest in the West Bank in more than a decade and raised concerns that the Israelis were imposing what critics called a collective punishment on the broader Palestinian population. At least five Palestinians have been killed in the security operation. Mr. Abbas called an emergency meeting of the Palestinian leadership for Tuesday to assess “the consequences of the latest events,” according to Wafa, the official Palestinian news agency. Early Tuesday, Sami Abu Zuhri, a Hamas spokesman, issued a statement emphasizing that “no Palestinian group, Hamas or any other group,” had taken responsibility.
Nabil Abu Rudeineh, a spokesman for President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority, said that Mr. Abbas had called an emergency meeting of the Palestinian leadership for Tuesday to assess the consequences of the latest developments. “We reject all Israeli allegations and threats against us,” he said. “We are already used to it and will know how to defend ourselves.”
Early Tuesday, Sami Abu Zuhri, a Hamas spokesman, issued a statement emphasizing that “no Palestinian group, Hamas or any other group,” had taken responsibility. “We reject all Israeli allegations and threats against us,” he said. “We are already used to it and will know how to defend ourselves.” Even before Israel’s late-night cabinet meeting, several of its right-wing ministers demanded a severe response. “This is the time for actions and not for talk,” Naftali Bennett, leader of the Jewish Home Party, wrote on Facebook. Yisrael Katz, the transportation minister and a member of Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud faction, urged the prime minister to “act with all our strength against Hamas in Gaza and the West Bank and teach Hamas a lesson.”
Colonel Lerner said he could not confirm that the victims had been shot, though a senior Israeli official who spoke on the condition of anonymity said they had been, most likely shortly after the abduction. Repeating the official Israeli view of the past two weeks, Colonel Lerner said “the terrorists who carried this out were Hamas terrorists,” and vowed that “we will continue our mission in order to bring the perpetrators of the abduction to justice.” President Obama issued a statement saying that “as a father, I cannot imagine the indescribable pain that the parents of these teenage boys are experiencing,” but also urging “all parties to refrain from steps that could further destabilize the situation.”
In Hebron, Israeli soldiers returned Monday night to the neighborhood of Israel’s two prime suspects in the kidnapping, Marwan Qawasmeh and Amer Abu Aisha, in what appeared to be a prelude to the demolition of their homes. Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, a spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces, said the bodies were uncovered by a team that included civilian volunteers at 5 p.m. Monday between Halhul and Beit Kahil, Palestinian towns near Hebron, an area hundreds of soldiers were scouring for more than a week. Micky Rosenfeld, a spokesman for the Israel Police, said the three teenagers — Naftali Fraenkel, 16, an American-Israeli citizen; his friend Gilad Shaar, also 16; and Eyal Yifrach, 19 — appeared to have been fatally shot shortly after they got into a car near the Kfar Etzion settlement south of Jerusalem.
Colonel Lerner said he could not immediately confirm Palestinian witness accounts that both homes were blown up. But Mr. Abu Aisha’s mother, Nadia, said the Israelis had demolished her house, as they did after another son was killed in 2005 when he tried to hurl an explosive at soldiers. The lack of a ransom demand, credible claim of responsibility, or any other signs of life made many Israelis suspect the worst. Paratroopers, special forces units, Bedouin tracker teams and dogs combed through caves day after day with no indication of progress.
She said Mr. Abu Aisha had left behind three children."I will educate them to be for jihad,” she said. “I promise they will be as their father, to be fighters and to be martyrs.” Benny Drupper, a member of the search team, said that signs of a discovery first emerged Monday afternoon when “one of the guys spotted something abnormal” in “an isolated, half-cultivated area” among the Hebron hills.
The Israeli soldiers blocked roads around the area and fired tear gas to disperse a crowd of 100 Palestinian protesters, some throwing stones. Clashes also broke out around the entrances to Hebron between Palestinians and Israeli settlers. “He moved some of the rocks and discovered a body,” Mr. Drupper said on Army Radio. “It is not an area someone would drive through every day unless he is a farmer there,” he added. “The search in this area was conducted with the understanding that a terrorist would think about such a location beforehand.”
Israeli television reports said the bodies had been discovered by volunteers, guides from the Kfar Etzion Field School. The television accounts said the bodies had been partly covered and appeared to have been dumped hurriedly, probably soon after the abduction. Though one of the teenagers phoned the police about 10:30 p.m. on June 12 and whispered, “I’ve been kidnapped,” the call was dismissed as a crank, delaying the search for hours. Mr. Rosenfeld said Monday that four police officers had been suspended over the handling of the call, but that prompter action would probably not have prevented the killings.
The three teenagers — Eyal Yifrach, 19; Gilad Shaar, 16; and Naftali Fraenkel, 16, who also holds United States citizenship — were last seen entering a car at about 10 p.m. on June 12 at a hitchhiking stop in the Gush Etzion settlement block, not far from the area where the bodies were found. As the news spread across this small country, Israeli television channels halted World Cup broadcasts and canceled prime-time shows, filling the hours with discussions of the discovery, while radio stations played sad songs.
One of the abducted youths managed to place an emergency call to the police and whispered that he had been kidnapped, but the police initially thought it was a prank call. The search only started hours later when some of the parents reported their sons missing. People converged in Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square, sitting on the ground and lighting candles, and others said psalms at the West Bank hitchhiking post where the teenagers were last seen. In Jerusalem, a small group of religious youths marched toward Mr. Netanyahu’s official residence waving Israeli flags and chanting, “Bibi, wake up!”
At 8 p.m. Monday, dozens of military and police vehicles had completely blocked off the north entrance to Halhul and Karmei Tzur, a Jewish settlement. In Halhul, police convoys were operating and scores of troops were visible. But there were practically no cars on Road 60, the main artery south from Jerusalem to Hebron — the road on which the teenagers would have hitchhiked toward home. Outside the Fraenkel home in Nof Ayalon, a serene suburb between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, weeping girls and mothers embraced next to a large banner with the Hebrew word for “live.”
In parallel to the search, the Israeli military conducted an aggressive campaign of arrests and raids aimed at weakening the infrastructure of Hamas in the West Bank. Michael Tikochinsky, a friend who was inside with the family, said Naftali’s mother, Rachel Fraenkel, “received the bad news in silence,” and was already dressed in black but had not yet told her youngest children of their brother’s fate. “I can’t talk about Naftali in the past tense,” said Ms. Tikochinsky, 45, adding that Ms. Fraenkel had only a few days ago ordered new eyeglasses for him to have when he came home.
As Israeli’s top ministers convened at 9:30 p.m. to discuss possible responses to the discovery of the bodies, several had already issued statements demanding severity. Tzurit Fenigstein, a neighbor of the Shaars in the West Bank settlement of Talmon, said in a telephone interview that a Tel Aviv rally Sunday night that drew tens of thousands “made the family feel they are not alone.”
Naftali Bennett, head of the right-wing Jewish Home party, wrote on his Facebook page that “there is no forgiveness to the murders of children” and “this is the time for actions and not for talk.” Though the focus of attention has been on the West Bank, the escalation in Gaza threatened to ignite a major confrontation.
Yisrael Katz, the transportation minister and a member of Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud faction, told reporters that Israel must “act with all our strength against Hamas in Gaza and the West Bank and teach Hamas a lesson.” Around 2 a.m. Tuesday, Israel unleashed a barrage of two dozen bombs across the coastal territory, hitting mostly open areas, according to witnesses. The assault came after Gaza militants fired about a dozen rockets — the heaviest barrage in months — into southern Israel Monday morning as children were preparing for the last day of school. Two houses were damaged.
David Pearl, a leader of the community council in Gush Etzion, the settlement bloc where the abductions occurred, called on the Israeli government Monday night to deport anyone connected with terrorism to Gaza or Jordan. While most of the rocket fire since the kidnapping has been attributed to small, rogue groups, Mr. Netanyahu on Monday accused a Hamas cell of being involved. Other Israeli officials said Hamas, which has for 18 months worked to safeguard a cease-fire with Israel, has lately let the rockets fly.
“How is it possible that two terrorists were allowed to walk freely and kill our boys?” he asked in an interview on Army Radio. “Such people and their entire clan need to be put on trucks and sent out of Israel.” He added, “We have had enough.” “Either Hamas stops it, as it is responsible for the territory, or we will stop it,” Mr. Netanyahu said.
A member of the search teams, Benny Drupper, said in an interview on Army Radio that the breakthrough began when “one of the guys spotted something abnormal.” Hours later, after the bodies were discovered, Danny Danon, Israel’s deputy defense minister, issued a statement promising that the government “would not stop until Hamas is completely defeated.”
“He moved some rocks and discovered a body,” Mr. Drupper said, describing the location as an isolated, half-cultivated area in a hilly landscape. “It is not an area someone would drive through every day, unless he is a farmer there,” he added. “The search in this area was conducted with the understanding that a terrorist would think about such a location beforehand.” As Monday turned to Tuesday, Jewish settlers and Palestinian residents were clashing at the entrance to Hebron, the home of the suspected kidnappers, Mr. Qawasmeh, a 29-year-old barber, and Mr. Abu Aisha, 33, who owns a store near Jerusalem. Israeli troops have repeatedly searched the men’s homes. They returned Monday night, blocking access to the houses, and fired tear gas at scores of Palestinians who showed up and threw stones.
Danny Danon, Israel’s right-wing deputy defense minister, issued a statement promising that the government would “not stop until Hamas is completely defeated.” Mr. Abu Aisha’s mother, Nadia, said the Israelis had demolished her house, as they did after another son was killed in 2005 when he tried to hurl an explosive at soldiers, and that Amer Abu Aisha had left behind three children. “I will educate them to be for jihad,” she said. “I promise they will be as their father, to be fighters and to be martyrs.”
“We must ensure that this tragic end be turned into an opportunity to create a better and safer Israel,” Mr. Danon said. “Israelis have the willingness and the fortitude necessary to endure the hardships of a long-lasting operation aimed at eradicating Hamas.” Colonel Lerner, the military spokesman, said troops had used explosives only to gain entry to the homes.
He called for the demolition of “homes of the terrorists” and destruction of their weapons caches, and urged the international community to halt “all aid to the Palestinian Authority.” “We are still pursuing the fugitives,” he told reporters earlier.
Rabbi Mordechai Malka of Elad, Israel, where the Yifrach family lives, told reporters as he departed the family’s home: “The only thing that encourages us all is the unity shown by the people of Israel around this difficult event. The only request of family is that Israel will continue on that path, and not only in times of sorrow.”
Tzurit Fenigstein, a neighbor of the Shaar family in Talmon, Israel, said in a telephone interview that a rally for the teenagers that was held in Tel Aviv on Sunday night, attended by tens of thousands, had “made the family feel they are not alone.”
She said the uncertainty of the last two weeks was difficult. “At least there is some small comfort that the tension is now behind us,” she said.