ISTANBUL

Hamas said Wednesday it used a “dummy corpse” in northern Gaza to mislead the Israeli army, denying accusations that it staged footage showing its fighters recovering the body of an Israeli captive.

In a video released on its Telegram channel, the group’s armed wing, the Qassam Brigades, said Israeli surveillance drones were tracking efforts to retrieve bodies of Israeli hostages killed in earlier airstrikes.

Hamas said Israel added those locations to its strike list and later bombed them “after the ceasefire,” in an attempt to destroy evidence.

The group said footage circulated by the Israeli army on Oct. 28, allegedly showing Hamas fighters exhuming a hostage’s body and reburying it nearby, was actually part of a “security deception.”

According to Hamas, its fighters placed pieces of cloth wrapped in a white shroud to resemble a corpse, intentionally allowing Israeli drones to film the scene.

Hamas said the ruse “fooled the enemy,” accusing Israel of exploiting the footage to claim the group was manipulating hostage remains. It said multiple “deception methods” were used during body recovery operations to block Israeli intelligence gathering.

Hamas has released 20 Israeli captives alive and handed over the remains of 22 out of 28, most of them Israelis, since the ceasefire took effect on Oct. 10. Israel, however, claimed that one of the received bodies did not match any of its listed captives.

Israel has tied the start of negotiations for the second phase of the ceasefire to the handover of all the hostage remains. Hamas says the process requires time due to the massive destruction in Gaza.

Phase one of the deal includes the release of Israeli hostages in exchange for nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners. The plan also envisages the rebuilding of Gaza and the establishment of a new governing mechanism without Hamas.

Israel has killed close to 69,000 people, mostly women and children, and injured over 170,600 others in attacks in Gaza since October 2023.

Palestinian authorities say 9,500 people remain missing under the rubble from Israeli bombardment, while more than 10,000 Palestinians, including women and children, are held in Israeli prisons.