Israel’s military announced in the early hours of Friday morning that they had found in Gaza the body of one of the hostages being held by Hamas, and are bringing him home to Israel.
Elia Toledano, 28, was snatched from the Supernova music festival on October 7, and taken across the border with his friend Mia Schem, a 21-year-old French-Israeli tattoo artist.
Schem spent 54 days in captivity, forced by Hamas to appear in a propaganda video demanding her release and saying she was being well treated. She was released on November 30.
Toledano’s death was announced by the IDF.
‘The body of 28-year-old Elia Toledano who was taken hostage by Hamas terrorists on October 7, has been recovered by our Special Forces in an operation in Gaza and brought back to Israel,’ they wrote on X.
‘The IDF sends the family its heartfelt condolences.
‘Our national mission is to locate the hostages and return all of them home. We are working together with security agencies, and with all intelligence and operational means in order to return all of the hostages home.’
The IDF did not say how he died, or when.
Toledano’s body is the sixth to be recovered by the IDF: he is the 20th hostage who the IDF confirms has died in Gaza.
He was one of 36 people taken hostage at the music festival. A further 200 were taken from kibbutzim in the surrounding area.
Of the 240 taken, 105 were released during a truce from November 24 to December 1.
Four hostages were released prior to the temporary truce and hostage release in late November, and one was rescued by troops.
It is believed that 134 hostages remain in Gaza — not all of them alive.
Toledano was last seen in the early hours of October 7 with his friend Schem at the Supernova festival.
Schem was shot in the arm during the attack, and following her release, her aunt said that while in captivity she had been operated on by a Palestinian veterinarian.
Hamas released a video in the early days of the war showing her recovering from surgery.
‘Hi, I’m Mia Schem, 21 years old from Shoham. Currently, I’m in Gaza,’ she said in the video, which many media networks refused to air.
‘I was seriously injured in my hand. I underwent surgery on my arm at the hospital for 3 hours. They are taking care of me, giving me medicine, everything is fine.’
The Hostages and Missing Families Forum describes Schem as ‘a young woman with an old soul’ who was studying tattooing and worked at a tattoo parlor prior to her kidnapping.
Let the animals on both sides murder each other until one side realizes that living by the sword will never end the carnage.
Israeli animals? Really? Hamas has been launching riockets into Israel since 2005…..and Isreal is full of animals? Israel NEVER did what Hamas did to them on Oct 7th
learn some history before makiing an ignorant post like this
youre a clown…..
What would you do if they run a bulldozer through your house? Ignorant is what you see in the mirror sheep.
If I had murdered their wives and children, or supported those that did, having a bulldozer driven through my house would be the least of my problems, and I’d deserve it. You sound very much like a fascist, and frankly, are an embarrassment to conservatives everywhere. .
@Trump 2024! – Me thinks you use your screen name to pretend you are a Trump supporter, but you are in fact on here with an agenda. Israelis are not “animals.” They try to live in peace in the region; they’ve attempted to warn Gazans to leave areas they are about to bomb; they had let Gazans cross the border to work in Israel peacefully before the war. They didn’t go into Gaza and gang rape women to the point where their pelvises broke, cut off heads of babies with shovels, put babies in ovens, and act in a maniacal manner on the drug Captagon so that they could be more fierce and brutish while they enact their long-planned assault on innocent people. Please. Don’t be ignorant. Jihadist Muslims are the animals, and savage ones at that!
Stealing land on daily basis is not living peacefuly, even though Bibi srlld it so. But then again that is what Yankees do best so it like arguing with an idiot.
Stealing land on a daily basis? Re-think that.
Is it painful? Being so incredibly stupid I mean. Or is the notion that ‘ignorance is bliss’ true?
Animals are only on the Hamas side. Israel is fighting for the right to exist.
STFU Troll
DO NOT STOP UNTIL EVERY SINGLE MEMBER OF HAMAS IS DEAD!!!!!!
LOL… that will fix them… the ‘old kill them all and let God sort them out’. You are shit for brains war monger sheep.
And you’re an idiot.
I pray some of the hostages are still alive but I really think they killed them all. Israeil take all these scums down.