This article is from the source 'nytimes' and was first published or seen on . It last changed over 40 days ago and won't be checked again for changes.
You can find the current article at its original source at http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/02/world/middleeast/details-emerge-in-deaths-of-israeli-teenagers.html
The article has changed 9 times. There is an RSS feed of changes available.
| Version 0 | Version 1 |
|---|---|
| Details Emerge in Deaths of Israeli Teenagers | Details Emerge in Deaths of Israeli Teenagers |
| (35 minutes later) | |
| JERUSALEM — The first clues that led to Monday’s grisly discovery of the bodies of three Israeli teenagers missing since June 12 came only hours after their abduction was reported. Inside a burned Hyundai i35 that had been stolen from central Israel a month earlier, a police spokesman said Tuesday, were a pair of tefillin, the leather phylacteries worn for morning prayer by religious Jews like the three youths. | JERUSALEM — The first clues that led to Monday’s grisly discovery of the bodies of three Israeli teenagers missing since June 12 came only hours after their abduction was reported. Inside a burned Hyundai i35 that had been stolen from central Israel a month earlier, a police spokesman said Tuesday, were a pair of tefillin, the leather phylacteries worn for morning prayer by religious Jews like the three youths. |
| DNA evidence from the car, which had been left in the West Bank village of Dura, perhaps a 20-minute ride from where the teenagers had last been seen trying to hitchhike home, was quickly matched to their parents. The authorities, unsure if the mission was rescue or recovery, used signal intelligence technology, interrogations of arrested Palestinians and thousands of soldiers and civilians to comb caves and cisterns in the vast stretch of hilly fields around Hebron, the West Bank’s largest city. | DNA evidence from the car, which had been left in the West Bank village of Dura, perhaps a 20-minute ride from where the teenagers had last been seen trying to hitchhike home, was quickly matched to their parents. The authorities, unsure if the mission was rescue or recovery, used signal intelligence technology, interrogations of arrested Palestinians and thousands of soldiers and civilians to comb caves and cisterns in the vast stretch of hilly fields around Hebron, the West Bank’s largest city. |
| A break came Thursday: the uncovering of a sandal that looked like one of the boys’, said the police spokesman, Micky Rosenfeld. Then, just before 1 a.m. on Sunday, the police brought a pair of spectacles found in the field to an eyeglasses store, where the owner, Shalom Friedman, confirmed that he had sold them to one of the teenagers, Eyal Yifrach, 19. | A break came Thursday: the uncovering of a sandal that looked like one of the boys’, said the police spokesman, Micky Rosenfeld. Then, just before 1 a.m. on Sunday, the police brought a pair of spectacles found in the field to an eyeglasses store, where the owner, Shalom Friedman, confirmed that he had sold them to one of the teenagers, Eyal Yifrach, 19. |
| The eyeglasses were “completely smashed,” Mr. Friedman said in a video interview posted on Tuesday on the Israeli news site Ynet. “It was a chilling moment.” | The eyeglasses were “completely smashed,” Mr. Friedman said in a video interview posted on Tuesday on the Israeli news site Ynet. “It was a chilling moment.” |
| Finally, on Monday at about 5 p.m., amid agricultural lands worked by the family of one of Israel’s two prime suspects in the abduction, search teams including volunteer hiking guides removed a bush that looked out of place, then a pile of stones, and then three bodies, which early Tuesday were confirmed by forensics to be Mr. Yifrach and Naftali Fraenkel and Gilad Shaar, both 16. | Finally, on Monday at about 5 p.m., amid agricultural lands worked by the family of one of Israel’s two prime suspects in the abduction, search teams including volunteer hiking guides removed a bush that looked out of place, then a pile of stones, and then three bodies, which early Tuesday were confirmed by forensics to be Mr. Yifrach and Naftali Fraenkel and Gilad Shaar, both 16. |
| “It was kind of a puzzle — there was no one golden piece of information,” a senior Israeli security official said Tuesday morning, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to do otherwise. | “It was kind of a puzzle — there was no one golden piece of information,” a senior Israeli security official said Tuesday morning, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to do otherwise. |
| “It’s a huge area,” he added. “Not hard to hide people there. Every day the search area got narrowed down. It was a complex intelligence operation.” | “It’s a huge area,” he added. “Not hard to hide people there. Every day the search area got narrowed down. It was a complex intelligence operation.” |
| Early Tuesday morning, Israel pummeled the Hamas-dominated Gaza Strip with 34 airstrikes, part of an escalation in which Gaza militants fired a barrage of rockets toward southern Israel on Monday. The Israeli assault began about 2 a.m. Tuesday, with what a military statement called a “precision strike.” The statement said that 18 rockets had been fired at Israel since Sunday evening, many of them panicking schoolchildren Monday morning as they prepared for the last day of school. | |
| The teenagers were scheduled to be buried together on Tuesday at 5:30 p.m. in Modiin, halfway between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, after individual processions from each of their homes. | The teenagers were scheduled to be buried together on Tuesday at 5:30 p.m. in Modiin, halfway between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, after individual processions from each of their homes. |
| The Israeli cabinet planned to meet afterward to plot a response to the killings; the Palestinian leadership was also convening on Tuesday to consider the consequences of the killings for its recent reconciliation with Hamas, the militant Islamic group that Israel says is behind the attack. |