Israel Said Their Sons Were Murdered by Hamas. These Mothers Weren’t Convinced.

BEERSHEBA, Israel—When commandos retrieved Ron Sherman’s body from the tunnel under Gaza, Israeli officials told the 19-year-old soldier’s mother that he had died at the hands of his Hamas captors.

At the time, in mid-December, Maayan Sherman had no reason to question their account of her son’s death.

Doubts began to emerge in the weeks afterward when a pathologist’s report found that the soldier’s remains showed no signs of trauma.

Maayan Sherman and the mother of another soldier, Nik Beizer, the same age and killed at the same time, began their own investigation. They called the families of other hostages, scanned Hamas social media and peppered Israeli officials with questions. Their persistence took them to the steel and glass offices of the military’s hostage-intelligence chief in Tel Aviv and secured meetings with other senior military officials and even the president.

It also extracted an admission from two senior military officials that an Israeli airstrike targeting a Hamas commander in November had killed their sons.

“We have to find out the truth about everything.” Sherman said. “Even if the truth is, ‘We had to kill them.’”

Israel’s military officials haven’t publicly acknowledged that the men died in an Israeli airstrike in northern Gaza in November. They say they have given all the information they have to the soldiers’ families. In response to questions about the death of the soldiers from The Wall Street Journal, Israel said that it had “no information about the presence of hostages in the tunnel of the commander of the northern division of Hamas, at the time of the attack.”

The Israeli military is increasingly confronting a grim reality: Some of the hostages in Gaza have been killed in its military offensive there against Hamas. The U.S. government believes some of those held in the enclave have died in Israeli airstrikes, a person familiar with American intelligence said. Some top Hamas leaders in the tunnels under Gaza are surrounding themselves with hostages, according to Israeli officials.

This account is based on dozens of interviews with hostages’ families, freed hostages, current and former Israeli and U.S. officials, and forensic and military experts, as well as a review of official documents surrounding the death of Sherman and other hostages.

The army’s leaders say military pressure will bring Hamas to the table and unlock hostage negotiations. But the strategy has come at the cost of significant collateral damage. More than 34,000 people have been killed in Gaza since the start of the war, most of them civilians, Palestinian officials say. The figure doesn’t specify how many were combatants. Among the dead from the war in Gaza are also some of those held hostage there, including some killed by Israel’s own forces.

Israeli officials say the air force consults intelligence about the whereabouts of hostages in Gaza when it plans airstrikes, part of its work to avoid civilian casualties, both Palestinian and Israeli, during the war, Israeli officials said.

“It’s all a matter of the broader question of how to reduce collateral damage,” said Maj. Gen. Tamir Hayman, a former head of intelligence for the Israeli military who now works at a think tank.

Israel has officially declared 46 of the more than 240 hostages taken on Oct. 7 dead, but has only retrieved the bodies of a dozen of them. Some Israeli and American officials privately estimate that the number is far higher. Most of the fatalities resulted from the Hamas-led attacks on Oct. 7, including some who were killed before being brought into Gaza, according to officials and Israeli health authorities. Still others have suffered from malnutrition or lack of medical attention to pre-existing conditions, according to Israeli medical officials.

Around the time that the bodies of Sherman and Beizer were retrieved from Gaza, Israeli troops shot dead three people who escaped their captors, having mistaken the hostages for militants. The military said in January that an airstrike hit targets close to two hostages who were later declared dead. In April, the Israeli military said that in the chaos of Hamas’s attacks on Oct. 7, its forces struck a car carrying hostages, killing Efrat Katz, a 68-year-old Israeli woman.

Other families of dead hostages are still searching for answers and public acknowledgments of what has happened to their loved ones since they were taken.

‘Bye mom’

Sherman worked for the Israeli military office that deals with civilian affairs in Gaza. Hamas gunmen seized him and Beizer from a small military base just north of the Gaza border during the Oct. 7 attacks that according to Israeli authorities left about 1,200 people dead, most of them civilians. Hiding in a shelter inside the base during the assault, Sherman reached out to his mother as the gunfire grew closer.

“Bye mom. I love you guys,” Sherman texted his mother at 7:12 a.m. on Oct. 7. “They’re here, this is it. It’s over.”

Then came the first indication that the men had survived. A video that surfaced later that day showed Hamas militants forcibly dragging Sherman and Beizer, who worked in army logistics, through a gap in the concrete wall into Gaza.

The kidnapping began months in which both mothers lived in a state of sleepless uncertainty. They knew little about their sons’ fate—living or dead, safe or unsafe. They feared Hamas’s brutality and the dangers of Israel’s own military offensive in Gaza.

On Nov. 5, the Israeli military told the pair’s families that officials had received a sign that both men were alive.

“I was always afraid of the airstrikes,” said Beizer’s mother, Katya Beizer. “I asked about this in every meeting that I had. ‘How do you know you are not harming the hostages?’” she says she asked Israeli officials.

On Nov. 1, the military showed the families a social-media post written in Arabic and Hebrew that pictured Sherman and Beizer with their arms raised behind their heads. “The bombing of northern Gaza aims to kill your sons who are held captive by the resistance,” the post said.

Sherman’s mother asked the military if the message meant Ron was more at risk from Hamas or an Israeli airstrike. The officer advised her to ignore the post, which he said was psychological warfare.

“There is no change in Ron’s status,” the officer told her in a text message viewed by the Journal. “You have to keep believing.”

In mid-November, military officials asked the mothers of Sherman and Beizer to provide DNA samples. Officials also asked about the men’s identifying tattoos, scars and birthmarks. “I understood something was wrong,” Maayan Sherman said.

Later that month, Israel agreed to a cease-fire deal with Hamas in which the militants freed just over 100 hostages in return for Palestinian prisoners. No military-age men were included in the deal. The fighting resumed a week later without an agreement to release Israeli soldiers held in Gaza, for whom Hamas is demanding the release of Palestinians serving life sentences in Israeli jails.

Sherman asked the military if she would be notified if her son died.

“You shouldn’t busy yourself with negative thoughts,” the officer texted. “We are thinking in a positive way.”

A knock on the door

On Dec. 15, Israeli military officers knocked on the doors of Beizer’s and Sherman’s homes to inform them that their sons had been murdered in Hamas captivity. A third hostage, the French-Israeli citizen Elia Toledano, who had been kidnapped from the Nova music festival on Oct. 7, was also found dead in the same tunnel under northern Gaza, military officials said.

Sherman didn’t ask any more questions at the time. She turned down an offer of a full autopsy, hoping to get the funeral over with.

“I didn’t want to know what Hamas did to him,” she said.

Beizer wanted to know exactly how her son had died. The army hadn’t determined that, the officers said. She elected for an autopsy to try to find out.

In January, the head of the Israeli military’s 551st Brigade, which carried out the mid-December operation that retrieved the bodies of the three hostages from Gaza, visited the homes of both mothers. He brought with him a pathologist’s report on the deaths of their sons. The military, he said, couldn’t rule out that they had been killed in an Israeli airstrike.

The news sent the two women on a frantic search for answers. They researched different types of bombs, combed through pathologists’ reports and read medical articles on decomposition and the effects of explosions.

After weeks of pressure on the military for answers, two senior Israeli military officials told the women that an Israeli airstrike was responsible for the deaths. The gases released by the bomb exploding in a nearby tunnel likely suffocated them, one official told Sherman.

One of the officials, Maj. Gen. Nitzan Alon, the Israeli officer in charge of hostage intelligence, acknowledged to the mothers in separate meetings in his office on the edge of Tel Aviv that their sons had been killed as “a secondary result” of an Israeli airstrike. The military didn’t know hostages were in the tunnel when it launched the strike, Alon said. The attack had targeted and killed a Hamas leader, Ahmed Ghandour, the commander of the group’s military wing in northern Gaza. The other official, the military’s top spokesman, Daniel Hagari, also confirmed to them that an airstrike was the cause of death.

Sherman thought the military had finally owned the mistake. But in public Israeli officials continued to say that the cause of the soldiers’ deaths couldn’t be determined. In hopes of finding closure, the families are still pressing the government to make its findings public.

Israeli military officials told the families that they are waiting for the results of a toxicology report to state finally and publicly how Sherman and Beizer died, their families said.

The Israeli military said that its representatives have given the families all the verified information it has. The military also said it wasn’t possible to determine the cause of the two men’s deaths based on the initial pathology report.

The airstrike in question took place Nov. 10, hitting a tunnel underneath the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza. Israel first announced the strike, which Hamas later said killed one of its commanders, on Nov. 16. The Israeli military spokesman, Hagari, said Ghandour and four others killed in the same series of strikes were “central partners in the massacre of Oct. 7.”

Current and former Israeli military officials and experts said bombs dropped by the Israeli air force that explode underground can release gases that can kill without leaving signs of trauma.

A senior Israeli military official confirmed that, before the war, the military had tested for the effects of fumes from bombs when they explode underground, anticipating attacks on Hamas tunnels.

The mothers of the soldiers Sherman and Beizer know they can’t change history but do want to alter the dates on their sons’ headstones. Instead of Dec. 14, 2023, the date when they were found dead, they want the gravestones to read Nov. 10, the day of the airstrike.

They say Israeli authorities told them the Defense Ministry would update the official date of death once it receives the toxicology report.

Nancy A. Youssef contributed to this article.

Write to Jared Malsin at [email protected]