“Until Friday, we did not know whether Hanan was alive or dead,” Shay Abadi, Hanan Yablonka’s brother-in-law, told JNS on Monday.
“In a meeting at around 8:30 a.m., the IDF told us they had found his body in Gaza. We were in shock, we are still in shock,” Abadi continued. “We did not want to believe that Hanan was murdered but now at least we know what happened to him.”
On Friday, the IDF announced that it had recovered the bodies of Yablonka, 42, Michel Nisenbaum, 59, and Orión Hernández Radoux, 30, from the Gaza Strip.
The bodies were recovered in Jabalia in northern Gaza during a joint operation conducted by the IDF and the Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet).
On Oct. 7, Hamas terrorists murdered Yablonka as he tried to flee the Supernova music festival near Kibbutz Re’im. He was considered a missing person for 90 days before the IDF confirmed his abduction to Gaza. His condition had not been known until last week.
“When we got the message that he was dead, we were in shock, it was a very sad day for us, for his kids [Emily, 10, and Yariv, 12], his parents, his friends and for the country, which wants to believe that the hostages are still alive in Hamas’s tunnels,” Abadi said.
On Sunday, some 10,000 people gathered for Yablonka’s funeral at the Kiryat Shaul Cemetery in northern Tel Aviv.
“Everybody came, all the families of the hostages, representatives from the government and people whom we did not even know. It was very hard,” Abadi told JNS.
“We don’t have a lot of time to get the hostages out of Gaza alive. Everybody needs to have hope, we need to act very quickly, otherwise this can happen to anyone. I don’t know whether it should be through a deal or in another way but we need to bring them back now,” he added.
An Egyptian source told CNN that negotiations are expected to resume in Cairo on Tuesday.
“We must resume negotiations to secure the return of all the hostages—the living for rehabilitation and the murdered for burial,” a spokesperson for the Hostage and Missing Families Forum told JNS on Sunday.
“To the government of Israel and the War Cabinet, we implore you: Do not rest until you have left no stone unturned and exhausted every possible avenue to bring them all home without delay,” the spokesperson said.