JERUSALEM (EJP)—Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told an emergency meeting of his cabinet Monday evening that Hamas is responsible and Hamas will pay’’ after the buried bodies of Eyal Yifrach (19), Gilad Shaar (16) and Naftali Fraenkel, a 16-year-old with dual Israeli-American citizenship, kidnapped on June 12, were found in an area between Halhul and Karmei Tzur, north of Hebron.
Israeli security forces, which had been conducting extensive searches in the area, sealed off the area and declared it a closed military zone. Hebron was also sealed off.
A search team from the local Kfar Etzion field school, along with IDF soldiers from an elite unit, found the teens. The local volunteers had been asking for two weeks to join the search.
The three boys were kidnapped at a hitchhiking post as they returned home from a Talmudic school outside the settlement of Alon Shvut in the Etzion Bloc south of Jerusalem.
The bodies were found at about 5 p.m., bound and partially buried, in an open field in a hard to access area known as Wadi Tellem.
The parents were informed on Monday evening that the bodies had been found. Relatives gathered in the three family homes.
The Israeli Prime Minister telephoned the families and expressed his condolences.
State Department spokeswoman Jan Psaki called the news of the killings “a tragedy,” and urged continued cooperation between Israel and the Palestinian Authority’s security forces despite “the pain on the ground.”
The three Israeli teenagers had been killed soon after their abduction, and the bodies were apparently disposed of hurriedly. The bodies were not in a good condition when they were found, Channel 2 said. “It was a harrowing sight.”