A three-member Health Ministry medical panel, which has been operating confidentially until now, yesterday ruled that several Israeli hostages are deceased, for lack of physical evidence.
The panel was established about two weeks into the war to spare families from not knowing what happened to their loved ones and to give them some closure.Women married to a hostage can now be declared widows by the IDF chief rabbi and Israel’s Chief Rabbinate so they can eventually remarry without being designated as an agunah – a “chained woman” whose husband has disappeared or who has left her, and with whom she is still technically married according to Jewish law.
The panel is comprised of Health Ministry General Medicine Division head Dr. Hagar Mizrahi; Prof. Ofer Merin, director-general of Jerusalem’s Shaare Zedek Medical Center (SZMC); and Dr. Chen Kugel, director of the Israel National Center of Forensic Medicine at Abu Kabir.
The physicians have studied videos and other information from the October 7 massacre and kidnapping by Hamas terrorists in southern Israel for signs of lethal injuries among those abducted and cross-referencing the data with the testimony of hostages who have been freed so far.
“As head of my hospital’s trauma unit for years and commander of the Israel Defense Forces’ field hospital providing urgent medical care in foreign disasters, I have seen thousands of dead bodies in my career,” the SZMC heart surgeon said.
“But in these last few weeks, I was involved in such an agonizing situation that I had never experienced before,” he said. “We were exposed to various types of information and had to determine which hostages were deceased without examining or even seeing bodies or body parts. If there had been bodies or body parts, we would not have been needed.”
Merin explained that the panel “presented an orderly written protocol according to the harm that the person suffered, and data from witnesses and other sources; then we concluded. We didn’t speak to the relatives at all. We understand the two extremes, of life and death. Loss is terrible, but not knowing [the missing person’s] fate is even worse.”
Case in point: Ron Arad
As an example of the case of a captive whose fate has still not been proven by physical evidence, Merin presents that of Israel Air Force weapon systems and navigation officer Ron Arad, who in October 1986 was lost on a mission over Lebanon. He was believed to have been captured by the Shi’ite terrorist group Amal and later handed over to Hezbollah.His wife, Tami, and their infant daughter, Yuval, suffered terribly for years due to uncertainty of whether he was alive and they should wait for his return or whether he hadn’t and they could go on with their own lives. They suffered from “ambiguous loss” – the ongoing pain of the lack of closure.Eventually, he was officially classified by Israel as missing in action. Seventeen years after his capture, an organization seeking information about him offered a reward of $10 million to anyone supplying information on him, but to no avail. Today, if Arad were alive, he would be 65 years old.“We dealt with data we received on some of the captives in Gaza. About half remain there and are either still alive or deceased,” Merin said. “People who provided us with information did a very important duty that also has military importance.”After the Health Ministry informs families of the committee’s ruling, they decide whether or not they will sit shiva (the seven-day Jewish mourning period).The ministry decided a few days ago that the committee’s confidentiality would be lifted, but the Shaare Zedek director-general thought it would have been better to leave its work unpublicized, because he “feared that people wouldn’t have understood the great complexity of our work.“We are ready to investigate more cases if needed,” he concluded. Health Ministry declares some Gaza hostages deceased, aiding families in limbo.