HEBRON, West Bank (Reuters) – The bodies of three missing Israeli teenagers were found in the occupied West Bank, and Israel vowed to punish Hamas, the Palestinian group it accuses of abducting and killing them.
“They were kidnapped and murdered in cold blood by beasts,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement after the military yesterday discovered the remains of the Jewish seminary students who disappeared on June 12.
“Hamas is responsible and Hamas will pay,” he said.
US President Barack Obama condemned the killings but called on all parties to exercise restraint.
Netanyahu, who earlier yesterday held Hamas responsible for new rocket strikes from Gaza, convened his security cabinet to consider moves against the Islamist group, which has neither confirmed nor denied Israel’s allegations about the kidnapping.
The senior ministers ended their late-night session without taking any final decisions and plan to reconvene later today, a government official said.
“Netanyahu’s threats against Gaza and against Hamas do not frighten us,” the movement’s Gaza-based leader, Ismail Haniyeh, was quoted as saying by its Al-Quds television station.
At the square in Tel Aviv where Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in 1995, scores of Israelis lit memorial candles for the teenagers, a day after thousands attended a prayer vigil for them at the same spot.
Hamas has been rocked by the arrest of dozens of its activists in an Israeli military sweep in the West Bank over the past three weeks during a search for the teenagers that Israel said was also aimed at weakening the militant movement
Up to six Palestinians died as a result of the Israeli operation, local residents said.
The kidnapping, near a settlement in the West Bank, appalled Israelis who rallied behind the youngsters’ families in a display of national unity reminiscent of times of war or national crisis in a country with deep political and religious divisions.
“On behalf of the people of Israel, I wish to tell their dear families … our hearts are bleeding, the entire nation is weeping with you,” Netanyahu said in the statement.
The bodies of Gil-Ad Shaer and US-Israeli national Naftali Fraenkel, both 16, and Eyal Yifrah, 19, were found in a field near Hebron, a militant stronghold, not far from a road where they were believed to have been abducted while hitchhiking, security officials said.