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Richelle Tzarfati, Ofir’s mother, voiced the raw anguish shared by many: “What turns the pain into something unbearable is the way Hamas chooses to play with the bodies of our boys, with our pain, with videos, manipulations, and vile presentations,” she said. She accused the militant group of subjecting grieving relatives to “continuous emotional abuse,” describing the repeated losses as a wound that is reopened every time new false hope is offered.
“It’s a punch to the gut, an arrow to the heart, a wound that opens again and again,” she said. Richelle added that what the family believed to be closure was shattered once more: “We thought we had closed the circle, that we were able to lay Ofir to rest, but today we discovered we never received all of him.”
Her words capture a cruel cycle: partial returns of remains, publicized recoveries staged for cameras, and families forced to re-experience fresh heartbreak. “I can’t grasp this. How can you bury your child in installments? How can you relive this once, and again, and again? Each time the grave is opened, my heart opens too, and another small piece of me is buried inside,” she said, laying bare the relentless toll on relatives still searching for answers.
The Tzarfati family and other victims’ relatives are adamant these episodes are not innocent mistakes. They maintain Hamas is fabricating scenes and withholding truth. “false presentations of ‘searches’ and ‘discoveries,’ when it is completely clear they know where most of the hostages are,” the family said, accusing the group of cynically staging moments that appear cooperative while actually obstructing real recovery efforts.
“Once again, deception has been inflicted upon our family as we try to heal,” the Tzarfati family said, according to the Times of Israel. They described being shown video evidence in which their son’s remains were apparently removed, buried, and presented to the Red Cross — “an abhorrent manipulation designed to sabotage the deal and abandon the effort to bring all the hostages home.”
Voices representing the broader community of victims’ relatives have urged decisive action. The Hostages and Missing Families Forum demanded punishment for Hamas’s conduct, saying: “Hamas’s repeated violations and the IDF’s documentation prove what we have known and stated clearly and unequivocally: Hamas knows the location of the hostages and continues to act with contempt, deceiving the United States and mediators while dishonoring our loved ones,” it said in a statement. “The Israeli government cannot and must not ignore this, and must act decisively against these violations.”
As anger mounts at both the battlefield provocations and the alleged manipulations surrounding remains, Israel’s leadership appears poised to respond, framing the strikes as necessary to uphold security and to hold Hamas accountable. For bereaved families, any government response will be measured not only in military terms but by whether it finally brings truth, returns the missing, and ends the cycle of pain Hamas is accused of perpetuating.
