In mid-December, the Israeli army found the bodies of three hostages kidnapped on 7 October in southern Israel’s Gaza Strip: soldiers Ron Sherman and Nik Beizer, and civilian Elia Toledano, and reported that all three had been killed in Hamas captivity, but Maayan, Sherman’s mother, soon claimed otherwise.
“Ron was indeed murdered,” she wrote on her Facebook page on January 16, but “not by Hamas.” Instead, she asserted, her son was killed by “bombings with poisonous gasses.”
She made her statement after reading the inconclusive results of a pathological report presented to her by a delegation from the Israeli army casualty department and the 551st Brigade.
According to two Israeli security sources who spoke to +972 and Local Call on condition of anonymity, this is not the first time that Israeli airstrikes on Hamas’s network of underground tunnels in Gaza have resulted in such deaths. For example, during an operation called “Operation Guardian of the Walls” in 2021, which killed only a few dozen Hamas members, people hiding in the tunnels were killed, but “not only from a bomb that hit them, but also from the fact that the bombings released gasses inside the tunnels.”
Maayan accuses the Israeli military of deliberately killing her son during the Gandour strike. She received a detailed report from the army after the examination of her son’s body, which also included a CT scan. “There are no fractures, no gunshot wounds, no dry blows,” she explained, adding that on 19 January, the head of the IDF’s Personnel Directorate told the family that “the matter is closed” and the army will not conduct any further investigations.
“Ghandour was under a very large building,” the source said. “We bombed knowing that the entire building would collapse. Many civilians were killed. But Ghandour wasn’t there. They missed. It took a second strike to kill him, also with a lot of collateral damage.”
That’s why Maayan accuses the military of killing her son for the sake of killing Ghandour. “Somebody is lying here,” she said. “It is clear to me that my son was sacrificed. I ask myself how they would act if it was Bibi [Netanyahu]’s son there, and not Ron. We underwent months of torture.”
IDF Spokesperson Daniel Hagari asserted that “the IDF did not know about the presence of hostages in the area.”
“We do not attack places where we know there may be hostages,” Hagari said.
However, Hagari’s statements are inconsistent with the testimony of a senior security source:
“We bombed Palestinians suspected of being kidnappers,” the source said. “We found such suspects and we bombed them. And it was surreal, because you see in the identification of the person you are bombing that he is a ‘suspected kidnapper’ of Israelis, meaning that there is a chance there are hostages next to him. In retrospect, we know that many Israelis were held underground. But for sure, mistakes happened and we bombed hostages.”
Later in the war, the army’s POW/Missing Persons Office informed them of areas they should not strike for fear that hostages would be harmed, but “At the start of the war, this didn’t happen,” the source said. “There was no protocol about the hostages. They weren’t taken into account.”
Katya, Beizer’s mother, said to +972 and Local Call that the army told them that the three men were being held in the same tunnel in which Ghandour was hiding when the army attacked.
“I told them I wouldn’t let them stop. After all, we were constantly told, in meetings with military and government officials, that they suspected there were hostages near senior Hamas figures. So if you know and suspect that there are hostages around, even if you don’t know who exactly, how can it be that you bombed?”
Then, Katia added that the only thing she cares about is cause of death:
“I want to know how it happened and when it happened. We don’t even know the dates. The state sacrificed them not once, but twice: first when they were abducted from their military base, which is supposed to be safe, and I called everyone possible and nobody saved them. And second when they were in captivity, and the army didn’t bring them back alive.”
In response to the accusations made in the article, the IDF spokeswoman stressed:
“The IDF shares the families’ grief for the difficult loss, and will continue to support them. IDF representatives have given the families all the verified information that the IDF has, and will continue to do so.”
