Israeli hostage Sahar Baruch, 25, an engineering student who was abducted from Kibbutz Be’eri on October 7, has been killed in Gaza — and the Hamas terrorist group is blaming Israel, saying that he was killed during an attempted rescue earlier this week.
As Breitbart News has noted, Kibbutz Be’eri was one of the hardest-hit communities in the October 7 terror attack by Hamas, with 100 people — roughly 10% of the population — murdered. Some of the killing was extremely brutal; homes were filled with blood.
Hamas released a propaganda this week video showing a blood-soaked floor and staircase, suggesting a body having been dragged through a building, and then showing Baruch’s bloodied, battered body (which Breitbart News will not publish). Israeli sources confirmed his death, and the community of Kibbutz Be’eri said that Hamas itself had murdered Baruch in captivity.
The Times of Israel reported:
Amid the continued fighting, Kibbutz Be’eri announced that its resident Sahar Baruch, who was kidnapped and taken hostage in Gaza on October 7, had been murdered while in captivity.
The statement did not detail how and when the 25-year-old died, but it came a day after Hamas released a propaganda video purporting to show his body.
…
Baruch, a Ben-Gurion University engineering student was with his grandmother, Geula Bachar, as well as his brother, Idan Baruch, 20, a soldier in the IDF’s Education Corps.
Sahar Baruch was reported to have run into his family’s home in an effort to retrieve his brother’s asthma inhaler. Both Geula and Idan were murdered and Sahar was taken hostage.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said this week that it had launched a rescue effort in which several Hamas terrorists were killed and two IDF soldiers were wounded. Hamas claimed that one IDF soldier had been wounded and one soldier had been killed in the effort. The IDF denied that a solder had been killed.
Hamas has lied about the deaths of hostages before. Last month, it claimed that kidnapped IDF soldier Noa Marciano, 19, had been killed in an Israeli airstrike. After the IDF recovered her body near Shifa Hospital, it concluded that she had been murdered.
Hamas has a clear motivation in claiming that a hostage was killed during a rescue attempt: it wishes to discourage such attempts, perhaps also hoping to play upon the strong public support within Israel for diplomatic efforts to release the hostages.
The IDF has warned people not to circulate propaganda published by Hamas as part of its ongoing psychological warfare efforts.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
