On June 30, 2014, the bodies of Israeli teenagers Gil-Ad Shaer, Naftali Frenkel, and Eyal Yifrah were found buried in a field near Hebron, about a 15-minute drive from where they were abducted.
The murder of the three teenagers led to the IDF’s invasion of Gaza the next week, launching the 2014 Gaza War, also known as Operation Protective Edge.
The three boys were taken on June 12 from a hitchhiking spot while on their way home from Gush Etzion, and when they realized their driver was not Israeli, Shaer was able to call police and whisper, “We’ve been kidnapped.”
After the boys’ disappearance, the IDF launched Operation Brother’s Keeper to arrest Hamas leaders in the West Bank.
During the operation, some 400 Palestinian suspects were arrested, and the IDF worked to dismantle Hamas’s system of mosques, schools, and hospitals used to spread its ideology in the West Bank.
Of those arrested, 56 had been released in the Gilad Schalit exchange three years earlier.
Terrorist ringleader given three life sentences
While the kidnappers, Marwan Kawasme and Amar Abu Aisha, were killed in a shootout with the IDF near Hebron in September 2014, ringleader Hussam Hassan Kawasme was given three life sentences for the crime.
Kawasme confessed to planning and financing the attack, including receiving NIS 200,000 from Hamas in the Gaza Strip, purchasing and providing weapons for the other terrorists, hiding the bodies and destroying evidence.
Kawasme “did not see the boys as human and killed them because they were Jews,” the IDF prosecutor, a lieutenant, said during the sentencing.