Thousands attend burials for 3 slain Israeli teens
Posted July 1, 2014 3:34 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Tens of thousands of mourners joined in an outpouring of national grief on Tuesday at the burial of three Israeli teenagers whose abduction and killing Israel blamed on Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist group it vowed to punish.
“They glorify death, and we glorify life. They glorify cruelty, and we glorify mercy. That is the secret of our strength and that is the foundation of our unity,” said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“I know that the murderers will be found. Israel will act with a heavy hand until terror is uprooted,” President Shimon Peres, a usually dovish elder statesman, said in a eulogy in the cemetery in the centre of the country.
Israel bombed dozens of sites in the Gaza Strip on Tuesday, wounding two Palestinians, striking at Hamas a day after finding the bodies of three youngsters in the occupied West Bank, not far from where they went missing while hitchhiking on June 12.
But officials said Israel’s security cabinet, which held an emergency session late on Monday and was due to meet again on Tuesday, was split on the scope of any further action in the coastal enclave or in the West Bank. The United States and regional power-broker Egypt urged restraint.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who attended the burial, has promised that Hamas would pay.
The military said aircraft attacked 34 targets in Gaza, mostly belonging to Hamas. Its statement did not link the strikes to the abductions. The military cited 18 Palestinian rockets launched against Israel from Gaza in the past two days.
Palestinian medics said two people were slightly wounded.
The Islamist group has neither confirmed nor denied involvement in the disappearance of the students nor in the cross-border rocket salvoes from Gaza.
In Jerusalem, dozens of Israelis gathered to demonstrate against what they consider a too moderate approach against Palestinian attacks. Some protesters chanted anti-Arab slogans. Another held aloft a sign reading ‘Revenge.’ Local media said 30 demonstrators were detained when police dispersed the protest.
Before their joint burial in the Israeli city of Modi’in, funeral services were held outside the homes of Gil-Ad Shaer and U.S.-Israeli national Naftali Fraenkel, both 16, and Eyal Yifrah, 19.
Israeli television and radio stations interrupted regular programming to broadcast the funeral, which began more than an hour late as large crowds streamed into the cemetery.
