Israelis on Sunday cheered the rescue of four hostages from war-torn Gaza while Palestinians counted the cost, with Hamas officials saying 274 people were killed and hundreds wounded during the daytime raid.
Special forces fought heavy gun battles with Palestinian militants on Saturday in central Gaza’s crowded Nuseirat refugee camp area as they swooped in to free the captives from two buildings and then flew them out by helicopters.
The Israeli military said the extraction team and captives came under heavy gun and grenade fire, which killed one police officer, while Israel’s air force launched strikes that reduced nearby buildings to rubble.
The Hamas-run Gaza Strip’s health ministry said 274 people were killed in what it labelled the “Nuseirat massacre”, updating an earlier toll of 210 from the government media office which said the fatalities included many women and children, figures that could not be independently verified.
The health ministry said 698 people were wounded.
“My child was crying, afraid of the sound of the plane firing at us,” said one Gaza woman, Hadeel Radwan, 32, recounting how they fled the intense combat as she carried her seven-month-old daughter.
“We all felt that we wouldn’t survive,” she told AFP, condemning “this brutal occupation that will not let us live”.
Many Israelis shed tears of joy when they heard of the release of the four captives, all reported in good health — Noa Argamani, 26, Almog Meir Jan, 22, Andrey Kozlov, 27, and Shlomi Ziv, 41.
The four had been abducted from the Nova music festival during Hamas’s October 7 attack when video footage showed gunmen taking away Argamani on a motorbike as she cried “Don’t kill me!”
The army released footage of the freed captives embracing their family members, and the government press office showed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visiting them in hospital.
Israel’s leading dailies, Yedioth Ahronoth and Israel Hayom, showed Argamani embraced by her father on their front pages under the same simple headline: “Home”.
Financial newspaper Calcalist hailed a “heroic operation” that had given Israelis “a few hours of grace”, while the left-leaning Haaretz daily called the rescue operation a “morale boost” for the nation.
