The Red Cross told CBS News on Wednesday that its staff in Gaza “were not able to intervene directly on-site” as alleged Hamas members were seen burying and then uncovering the remains of a deceased hostage in the Palestinian territory earlier this week.
The Israel Defense Forces released a video on Tuesday which it said showed the incident.
The Red Cross said it was “raising its concerns directly with parties.”
The video, which appears to have been filmed by an IDF drone, shows masked men, some in military fatigues and others in civilian clothing, removing a shrouded body from a building near Gaza City’s Shejaiya neighborhood and carrying it into a large adjacent pit, before burying it under rocks and dirt by hand.
A bulldozer is then shown lifting the body and a quantity of dirt and moving it to the front of the building, where it stayed as three people wearing red ICRC vests arrived.
The three people wearing ICRC vests remained at the site as the men moved the body from the bulldozer, placed it onto a large mound of dirt and buried it a second time.
Several minutes later, the video, which had been edited, shows a man with a shovel partially uncovering the body again while three people wearing red ICRC vests look on.
A man identified by the IDF as a photographer appears to film the second unearthing of the body, while the three apparent ICRC representatives stand near a road a short distance away from the site.
IDF Video
CBS News has verified the video’s location in Gaza City, but was unable to independently verify the date or time the video was filmed or the identities of the masked men in the video. The video released by the IDF also includes several edits, where video clips were joined together.
The IDF accused Hamas of “attempting to create a false impression of efforts to locate the bodies, while in fact holding deceased hostages whose remains it refuses to release as required by the agreement.”
The remains were later identified as belonging to Ofir Tzarfati by his family. Israeli officials had said his body was previously recovered from Gaza during a military operation shortly after the start of the war, before these additional remains were handed over.
In a statement shared by a group representing Israeli hostage families on Tuesday, the Tzarfati family said Hamas had inflicted a deception “upon our family as we try to heal.”
“This morning we were shown video footage of our beloved son’s remains being removed, buried, and handed over to the Red Cross — an abhorrent manipulation designed to sabotage the deal and abandon the effort to bring all the hostages home,” the family was quoted as saying.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office criticized Hamas for handing over Tzarfati’s remains, rather than one of the 13 deceased hostages still missing in Gaza, calling it “a clear violation of the agreement” brokered by President Trump to halt the two-year war.
The IDF said it had recorded Hamas operatives on Monday “removing body remains from a structure that had been prepared in advance and burying them nearby,” and then staging “a false display of discovering a deceased hostage’s body.”
“ICRC staff were not aware the human remains shown in the video in the mouth of an excavator had been previously staged,” the global charity told CBS News in a statement on Wednesday, stressing that the recovery of human remains “is the responsibility of parties under international humanitarian law, and ICRC staff are not involved in retrieval.”
The charity, which has helped to facilitate the transfer of Israeli hostages’ remains from Gaza back to Israel, said in a statement shared with CBS News earlier Wednesday that members of its team who appear in the IDF video “were not aware that a deceased person had been placed there prior to their arrival, as seen in the footage. In general, our role as neutral intermediary does not include the unearthing of the bodies of the deceased.”
Israel’s foreign ministry said on social media that it “appreciat(ed) the Red Cross condemnation of Hamas’ staged ‘burials’ & ‘discoveries’ of hostage bodies (which they previously extracted from Hamas holding sites),” but it added: “There seems to be a gap between what the Red Cross office knows & reality, given footage of Red Cross staff at the deception. We trust @ICRC will take action regarding lies their staff apparently report upwards.”