The Israeli military is believed to have stripped a group of men to their underwear and “paraded them” around a central square in Gaza.
Pictures and footage being widely shared on social media show the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) standing near a large group of men it had captured, some of whom appear to have their hands tied behind their backs.
In one snap, the men are blindfolded and kneeling on the ground, while in another they are seen sitting barefoot on their knees in a partially destroyed Gazan square, while their shoes can be seen strewn nearby. Another picture appears to show undressed men loaded in the back of a military truck.
The images, shared by both Israeli and Palestinian commentators, are believed to have been taken in the northern part of the Gaza Strip.
The AFP news agency suggested the scenes were filmed in Beit Lahia in the north of Gaza. Express.co.uk can’t independently verify when and where the images were taken.
Israeli outlet Walla claimed the men were stripped “to rule out the possibility that they were carrying weapons”. The news outlet added the soldiers from the 261st Reserve Brigade would “investigate” the detainees without bringing them to Israel, “since there is a likelihood that the suspects are innocent people living in a humanitarian shelter in the vicinity”.
Itay Blumenthal, a military correspondent for Israel’s Kan News, claimed the IDF detained the men before checking if any of them were members of Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
Osama Hamdan, a senior representative of Hamas in Lebanon, claimed the detainees were “unarmed civilians who have nothing to do with military operations”.
Since these images, some of which appear to have been taken from an Israeli army vehicle, started circulating, some Palestinians reportedly recognised their relatives among the people pictured.
Qatar-based Al-Araby news outlet issued a statement claiming to have identified one of the people in the footage as one of its journalists.
Speaking to reporters after the footage emerged, IDF spokesperson Daniel Hagari said his country’s military has detained and interrogated hundreds of people in Gaza suspected of having links with Hamas.
He also said: “Jabalia and Shejaiya are ‘centres of gravity’… for terrorists, and we are fighting them. They are hiding underground and come out and we fight them.
“Whoever is left in those areas, they come out from tunnel shafts, and some from buildings, and we investigate who is linked to Hamas, and who isn’t. We arrest them all and interrogate them.”
Israel first issued an evacuation order for the area northern of Wadi Gaza in mid-October, a few days after Hamas sparked the new war by launching an unprecedented terror attack on October 7. Tel Aviv immediately responded to the attack by launching a series of airstrikes on Gaza before sending its troops inside the northern part of the Strip.
After hundreds of thousands of displaced people relocated to the southern part of the Strip, the IDF warned earlier this week that it would extend its ground operation to Khan Younis, a city in the south where an estimated 167,000 people needed to leave.
Moreover, Gaza’s southernmost city of Rafah and its suburbs came under intense Israeli air strikes on Thursday.
