IDF Finds Body of Hostage Yehudit Weiss, Cancer Patient, near Shifa Hospital

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) announced Thursday evening that soldiers had recovered the body of hostage Yehudit Weiss, 64, near Shifa Hospital.

Weiss lived on Kibbutz Be’eri, one of the hardest-hit communities in the October 7 terror attack. Her husband, Shmulik, was also murdered; their children and grandchildren survived.

According to Israel’s Channel 12, Weiss was also a cancer patient, having been diagnosed with breast cancer three months before the terror attack.

In a statement, the IDF said:

The body of Yehudit Weiss, who was abducted by the Hamas terrorist organization, was extracted by IDF troops from a structure adjacent to the Shifa Hospital in the Gaza Strip and was transferred to Israeli territory. In the structure in which Yehudit was located, military equipment including Kalashnikov rifles and RPG’s were also found.

Following an identification process that was conducted by military medical and rabbinate personnel, together with the Institute of Forensic Medicine and the Israel Police, today (Thursday), IDF and Israel Police representatives informed the family of Yehudit Weiss, who was abducted from her home in Be’eri on October 7th by the Hamas terrorist organization, that she has been declared dead.

The IDF sends its heartfelt condolences to the family.

The national task before our eyes is to locate the missing and return the abducted persons home. The IDF is operating alongside and in full coordination with the relevant national and security institutions in order to pursue these tasks. We will not cease from the mission until it will be completed.

Israel has been operating carefully and methodically in Shifa Hospital, which is known to be a headquarters for Hamas. Thus far, the IDF has found weapons caches and intelligence information at the hospital, as well as signs of an underground tunnel network.

Some 238 hostages remain in captivity. President Joe Biden said Thursday that there had been progress on a deal to release them, but agreement had been elusive.

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.