Dr. Maayan Sherman, a veterinarian, charges that the IDF carried out a poison gas attack that killed her son, Ron Sherman, a hostage of Hamas kept in a tunnel. She added that the IDF had knowingly put the hostages at risk. This was provoked by an incomplete report issued yesterday by the IDF, and possibly by some rather suspicious developments.
In November, the IDF carried out an airstrike near the location where, later, the bodies of three Israeli hostages were found. The IDF was targeting the commander of Hamas’s Northern Gaza Brigade, Ahmed Ghandour. A week later, Hamas released a video claiming that it was an Israeli airstrike that killed the three hostages.
Israel recovered the bodies on Dec.14, 2023. According to the Times of Israel, yesterday, more than a month later, IDF “representatives presented the families… with a pathology report showing that their bodies had no signs of trauma or gunfire, indicating that they were not killed directly by an airstrike or other IDF action.” The headlines are that the IDF has proven Hamas wrong.
However, a closer reading shows that this is not the case. First, the IDF was not able to state the cause of death. TOI reported: “At this stage, the military cannot confirm or deny that they may have suffocated, been strangled, poisoned, or another cause indirectly related to an IDF attack or Hamas action, it said.” They offered the excuse that they were not aware of any hostages in the area when they carried out their strike. As delayed as their report was, they presented it without having any results from toxicology tests.
Dr. Sherman posted on Facebook a picture of her 19-year-old son, according to TOI, and wrote: “Not by Hamas, think more in the direction of Auschwitz and the showers but without Nazis and without Hamas. Not by accidental fire, not by friendly fire, but premeditated murder: bombs with poison gas. There is no future for this country if this is what they did to you after they abandoned you that Shabbat [that is, October 7]. What would have been the decision if it was Bibi’s son there in the terrorists’ tunnels, or the grandson of [Defense Minister Yoav] Gallant? Or the son of [IDF Chief of Staff] Herzi Halevi. Would they also have been poisoned by gas bombs?” She blamed the “criminal negligence of a government of powerful degenerates” for the mass kidnapping on Oct. 7.
Haaretz added a significant detail not included in TOI's coverage, that Dr. Sherman had written: “Oh yes, they also found that he had several crushed fingers, apparently due to his desperate attempts to escape the poison grave that the IDF dug for him when he tried to breathe fresh air, but only breathed IDF poison.”
Today’s bizarre sequel is that Dr. Maayan Sherman reported on Facebook that the Defense Ministry has now removed the headstone from her son’s grave.
