(WASHINGTON) — Longtime Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell announced on Thursday he will not seek reelection next year.
McConnell, who turned 83 today, was largely expected to end his Senate tenure at the conclusion of his term in January 2027 but made it official in a floor speech in which he reflected on his decades-long political career.
“Seven times my fellow Kentuckians have sent me to the Senate. Every day in between I have humbled by the trust they place in me to do their business, right here,” he said. “Representing our commonwealth has been the honor of a lifetime.”
“I will not seek this honor for an eighth time,” he continued. “My current term in the Senate will be my last.”
The Kentucky lawmaker stepped down from his role as party leader last year after a record-breaking 18 years atop the GOP conference.
McConnell said Thursday that serving in the role was “a rare and, yes, rather specific childhood dream” come true.
Since ending his tenure as leader, McConnell has distinguished himself as one of few Republican senators willing to challenge President Donald Trump. He has voted against three of Trump’s Cabinet nominees so far, more than any other GOP lawmaker in the body.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
(WASHINGTON) — Gen. CQ Brown, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Adm. Lisa Franchetti, the Navy’s top admiral, are among the list of general officers provided to Congress this week indicating that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth could fire or remove from their current jobs, according to two U.S. officials.
Brown serves as the president’s senior military advisoer and has been chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff since October 2023, his four year tenure is supposed to end in 2027.
Franchetti has been the Chief of Naval Operations since November 2023.
Both officers had previously been criticized by Hegseth prior to his becoming defense secretary during the Trump administration.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
Fired CFPB employee, Elizabeth Aniskevich says they were ‘tossed on the streets’ with no info, haven’t been able to get forms for unemployment; ABC News
(WASHINGTON) — For many, a federal government job was a marker of stability or a way to serve the country, in some cases a “dream” job.
But a week after the Trump administration started to hack away at government agencies, many employees who were cut are left fearing for their future and in the dark about their next steps.
Days after they’d been let go, employees at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s hadn’t received the paperwork they needed to file for unemployment, said Elizabeth Aniskevich, who was a litigation counsel for the agency before she was told her job was eliminated.
“It’s really been a total roller coaster of emotions,” she said. “I will say the solidarity among those of us who have been terminated has been amazing, but we can barely get information.”
Aniskevich was fired with 70 other employees who were still in their probationary period. Many of them are keeping in touch through a group chat.
“We have not received forms that are requested to file for unemployment,” she said. “We have no real understanding of when our health insurance terminates,” she said. “We just have no information. We were just basically tossed out on the streets, and so that has been angering and heartbreaking, and our pay stopped the day we got the termination letter, so we’re all without a paycheck as of Tuesday.”
“I think the main question is, ‘What are we going to do?’” she said.
“I’m a single person in my house. I’m responsible for my insurance and for my mortgage, and I worked really hard to buy this house on my own after putting myself through law school, and I don’t know how I’m going to continue to make mortgage payments very far into the future,” she said.
Aniskevich said she chose to work for the CFPB because she was raised in a military family that believed in service.
“My dad was in the military for 27 years, and he really instilled in me a commitment to this country and to public service,” she said.
Katie Butler, a Department of Education lawyer, knew her days with the agency were numbered.
“Ever since the start of the Trump administration, we knew there would be a cut in federal employees,” she said.
She and her colleagues also knew that the first people to go would be probationary employees with less protection.
And while she expected to be terminated, certainty came with the “Fork in the Road” notice, an email from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) that introduced a new program called “deferred resignation, that allowed them to continue to work until Sept. 30. Around 75,000 federal employees took the buyout, according to the White House.
Butler is also an adjunct professor at the Thomas R. Kline School of Law at Duquesne University in Pennsylvania, where she earned her law degree.
She says she was teaching a class when she got the Fork in the Road notice and didn’t see it immediately. The next day, she got a termination letter.
Her supervisors asked, “Did you get a termination notice, because we don’t know who got one.”
Butler doesn’t hold her abrupt termination against them.
“I don’t think this is coming from them, they are doing their best, but this is not the way you run the federal government system.”
Butler and her colleagues were told they could appeal through the Merit Systems Protection Board but she says she knows the decision would be hard to appeal.
The loss of her job has also hit her financially — she had just bought a house in June that she’s been remodeling and also has student debt of around $140,000.
Butler began working for the federal government “right out of college.”
She worked for the National Park Service and at the Bureau of Labor Statistics before getting into law school. In September 2024, she joined the Department of Education, where she had to complete a new probationary period despite having previously established career status.
She says the job she lost was “one of the exact jobs I went to law school for.”
“Career-wise, this is a big detour from what I expected,” she said. “I went to law school because I planned to work long-term as a public servant.”
Given what she calls “the somewhat disrespectful and unthoughtful way this is being handled,” Butler says she will take a detour away from the federal government.
“It’s honestly just really disappointing, from like a personal standpoint.”
Her plan is to go into general litigation at a mid-size to large law firm or a solicitor’s office. She has also considered local government work, given her experience.
She may go to work for a city. Even now, she is “still dedicated to doing good as a civil servant but not under the present circumstances.”
Victoria DeLano, who was an equal opportunity specialist in the education department’s Office for Civil Rights based in Birmingham, Alabama, said she was outraged when she received notice that she had lost her job last week.
“I think that the work that the Office for Civil Rights does is absolutely instrumental to children in my state,” she said.
“When you take out of the equation a fully staffed Office for Civil Rights, you’re taking away an avenue to resolution and an avenue to law enforcement, a really important avenue to law enforcement.”
“These students have no one else,” she said. They can still file complaints with OCR. Please understand OCR is understaffed at best, and OCR right now does not have external communication with you all. So I don’t know where they turn,” she added.
DeLano also called her position a “dream job.”
“It’s something that I’m extraordinarily passionate about because I believe with my history working with students with disabilities,” she said. “So I jumped at the chance to take this job, and absolutely loved it.”
She is concerned that the Trump administration has no clear plan to shrink the federal government, nor is it considering students with disabilities.
“This dismantling of our government right now is just being done with a sledgehammer without thought of what are the implications be to the individuals who are serviced by these agencies,” she said.
That sentiment is echoed by Butler.
“It takes a while to build a government system, but when [you] tear it down this quickly, it can cause a lot of damage,” she said. “The progress feels slow. This could take 100 years for us to rebuild.”
(MADRID) — Former Spanish soccer federation president Luis Rubiales has been found guilty of sexual assault of stemming from his nonconsensual kiss of footballer Jenni Hermoso at the 2023 World Cup Final.
Spain beat England 1-0, taking home the 2023 World Cup title. Rubiales kissed Hermoso without her consent during the team’s trophy ceremony, which was captured on video and in photos.
Rubiales was suspended from his position in August 2023 after the incident. Nearly the entire coaching staff has resigned amid the controversy.
Rubiales had claimed that the kiss was consensual, but Hermoso publicly denied that claim.
After refusing to resign amid pressure from the Spanish government, players, soccer clubs and officials, he later resigned from his position. In October 2023, Rubiales was banned by FIFA from all soccer activities for three years.
The incident triggered protests and fed into the wider discussion about sexism and consent.
Rubiales could face more than a year in prison.
Last year, a judge said there was enough evidence for Rubiales and three other former executives with the Royal Spanish Football Federation to go to trial.
Prosecutors asked for a two-and-a-half-year sentence for Rubiales, arguing he held Hermoso’s head without her consent and that the nonconsensual kiss had personal and professional consequences for the soccer player, prosecutors told ABC News. He could also face a fine of at least 50,000 euros ($54,000), prosecutors said.
Prosecutors asked for Rubiales to be prohibited from communicating with or coming within a 200-meter radius of Hermoso.
The prosecutor’s office said it also requested one-and-a-half years in prison for the three former executives who the judge said may have put pressure on Hermoso to say it was a consensual kiss.
-ABC News’ Aicha El Hammar Castano contributed to this report
(WASHINGTON) — The Senate on Thursday will vote on Kash Patel’s controversial nomination to lead the FBI.
If confirmed, Patel will be the 18th Cabinet official approved by lawmakers since President Donald Trump’s inauguration one month ago.
Republicans have rallied around Patel, arguing he would bring reform to the nation’s top law enforcement agency they allege has been corrupted.
“Mr. Patel should be our next FBI director because the FBI has been infected by political bias and weaponized against the American people. Mr. Patel knows it, Mr. Patel exposed it, and Mr. Patel has been targeted for it,” Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said last week as the committee met to consider his nomination. The panel advanced Patel in a party-line vote.
Democrats, meanwhile, have objected to Patel up until the last minute. Sen. Dick Durbin, the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, held a press conference outside FBI headquarters on Thursday morning railing against Patel’s “bizarre political statements” on Jan. 6 to retribution.
He accused Republicans of “willfully ignoring red flags on Mr. Patel,” who he argued has “neither the experience, the judgment or the temperament” to be FBI chief for the next 10 years.
“Mr. Patel will be a political and national security disaster,” Durbin said.
Patel, 44, is a loyalist to the president and worked in a number of roles during Trump’s first administration, including acting deputy director of national intelligence.
Shortly after the November election, Trump indicated he would fire then-FBI Director Christopher Wray and tap Patel to take his place. Wray, first appointed by Trump in 2017, stepped down at the end of the Biden administration.
Patel has been a vocal critic of the FBI for years, and previously said he wanted to clean out the bureau’s headquarters in Washington as part of a mission to dismantle the so-called “deep state.”
He faced pointed questions from Democrats on those comments and more — including support for Jan. 6 rioters and quotes that appeared favorable to the “QAnon” conspiracy movement — during his confirmation hearings last month.
Patel sought to distance from some of his past rhetoric, and told lawmakers he would take “no retributive actions” despite his history of comments about targeting journalists and government employees.
Patel, if confirmed, will take over an agency facing uncertainty and turmoil amid firings and other key changes.
The Justice Department’s sought a list of potentially thousands of FBI employees who worked on Jan. 6 cases, ABC News previously reported, prompting agents to file a lawsuit to block the effort.
A view of the destruction after Russian forces launched a guided aerial bomb (KAB) attack, in Kherson, Ukraine on February 19, 2025. As a result of attack fifteen apartments were destroyed. At least 6 people wounded, including two 14-year-old children. (Photo by State Emergency Service of Ukraine/Handout/Anadolu via Getty Images)
(LONDON) — National Security Adviser Mike Waltz said Thursday that officials in Kyiv “need to tone it down” after a fierce back and forth between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy related to a potential deal to end Russia’s three-year-old invasion of its neighbor.
U.S.-Russia talks began this week in Saudi Arabia without Ukrainian participation, Kyiv’s exclusion prompting condemnation in Ukraine and across Europe as well as a vow from Zelenskyy that his country would not sign any deal agreed over its head. Zelenskyy also pushed back on a proposed deal that would give the U.S. access to hundreds of billions of dollars worth of minerals.
Responding to the discord, Waltz told Fox News that the Ukrainians “need to tone it down and take a hard look and sign that deal,” referring to the proposed minerals agreement.
“There’s obviously a lot of frustration here,” Waltz said after Wednesday’s war of words.
Seeking to explain the strong remarks from Trump and Vice President JD Vance, Waltz said, “We presented the Ukrainians really an incredible and historic opportunity to have the United States of America co-invest with Ukraine, invest in its economy, invest in its natural resources and really become a partner in Ukraine’s future in a way that’s sustainable, but also would be — I think — the best security guarantee they could ever hope for, much more than another pallet of ammunition.”
Trump on Wednesday attacked European allies and the Ukrainian leadership for having failed to end Russia’s war. The president went on to call Zelenskyy a “dictator without elections,” claiming — without providing evidence — that his Ukrainian counterpart’s public approval rating was as low as 4%.
Trump also wrote on Truth Social that Zelenskyy “better move fast or he is not going to have a country left.”
Zelenskyy, meanwhile, suggested Trump is in a “disinformation space,” attributing at least some of the U.S. leader’s criticism to Russian disinformation campaigns.
Vance then warned that Zelenskyy’s approach to dealing with the Trump White House was “atrocious.”
In Moscow, meanwhile, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters Thursday that Ukrainian officials had made “unacceptable and impermissible” remarks about foreign leaders “in recent months.”
“Rhetoric used by Zelenskyy and numerous other representatives of the Kyiv regime in general leaves much to be desired,” Putin’s spokesperson said.
The diplomatic spat was set against the backdrop of continued Russian strikes across Ukraine. On Thursday, Ukraine’s air force said Russia launched 14 missiles and 161 drones into the country in a massive overnight bombardment.
Ukraine’s air force said it shot down 80 of the drones launched in the latest Russian barrage, with another 78 lost in flight without causing any damage. The 14 missiles targeted energy infrastructure, the air force said, adding it would not reveal how many were intercepted.
Ukrainian Energy Minister German Galushchenko wrote on Facebook that Russia conducted a “massive” missile and drone attack on “gas infrastructure.”
The aim of the “criminal attacks” was to “stop the production of gas, which is necessary to provide citizens’ household needs and centralized heating,” he said.
“While Russia continues to blatantly lie about not attacking civilian critical infrastructure, we are witnessing multiple missiles targeting Ukrainian gas mining facilities at once,” Galushchenko wrote.
“Such actions of the enemy prove only once again that Russia is trying to hurt ordinary Ukrainians, plunged into the cold in the middle of winter,” he added. “This is outright terrorism.”
Russia’s Defense Ministry, meanwhile, said its strike targeted “gas and energy infrastructure facilities that ensure the operation of the military-industrial complex of Ukraine.”
“The strike’s objective has been achieved,” the ministry said. “All facilities have been hit.”
Russia’s long-range strikes into Ukraine have not eased despite the opening of talks aimed at ending Moscow’s three-year-old full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Russia’s latest salvo came with Trump’s Ukraine-Russia envoy Keith Kellogg in Kyiv to meet with Ukrainian leaders. Items of discussion are expected to include the proposed deal with the U.S. for access to the country’s mineral resources and the larger possible peace deal with Moscow.
On Thursday, Zelenskyy marked the anniversary of the culmination of Ukraine’s 2014 Maidan Revolution — in which pro-Western protesters overthrew Moscow-aligned President Viktor Yanukovych.
“It was in these days of 2014 that Russia chose war — it began the first steps towards the occupation of Crimea,” Zelenskyy wrote on Telegram. “While people were being killed in Kyiv, and people were defending their freedom, Putin decided to strike another blow.”
“Since then, the world has been living in a new reality, when Russia is trying to deceive everyone,” the president wrote. “And it is very important not to give in, to be together. It is very important to support those who defend freedom.”
Ukraine is continuing its own long-range campaign against Russian military and industrial infrastructure, especially targets linked to the country’s lucrative fossil fuel industry. Ukrainian security services have referred to the campaign as “drone sanctions.”
Russia’s Defense Ministry said on Thursday that its forces shot down 13 Ukrainian drones over the previous 24 hours.
ABC News’ Nataliia Popova, Oleksiy Pshemyskiy, Fidel Pavlenko, Kelsey Walsh and Joe Simonetti contributed to this report.
LONDON — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said President Donald Trump is in a “disinformation space” as public recriminations between the two leaders deepened on Wednesday amid nascent talks to end Russia’s three-year-old full-scale invasion of its neighbor.
The series of attacks, Zelenskyy suggested, were informed in part by “disinformation,” which the Ukrainian president said “comes from Russia — and we have evidence.”
Trump called Zelenskyy a “dictator without elections,” claiming — without providing evidence — that his Ukrainian counterpart’s approval rating was as low as 4%. Trump also wrote on Truth Social that Zelenskyy “better move fast or he is not going to have a Country left.”
Trump’s apparent push for new elections in Ukraine aligns with longstanding Kremlin talking points framing Zelenskyy as an “illegitimate” leader unsuitable for peace talks.
Ukraine’s latest presidential election was scheduled to be held in 2024, but was postponed due to Russia’s war on the country. Ukraine’s constitution stipulates that elections cannot be held under martial law, which was introduced within hours of Moscow’s February 2022 invasion.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has sought to weaponize the delay to undermine Kyiv. “You can negotiate with anyone, but because of his illegitimacy, he has no right to sign anything,” Putin said of Zelenskyy in January.
The country’s parliament and its speaker “remain the only legitimate authorities in Ukraine,” Putin declared in May 2024, the month that was supposed to mark the end of Zelenskyy’s term.
Trump’s broadside against Zelenskyy included a call for new elections, despite the ongoing war. “That’s not a Russia thing, that’s something coming from me and coming from many other countries also,” Trump said.
Dmitry Medvedev — Russia’s former president, prime minister and a longstanding top ally of Putin — was gleeful in his response to Trump’s most recent remarks.
“If you’d told me just three months ago that these were the words of the US president, I would have laughed out loud,” Medvedev — who is now the deputy chairman of Russia’s security council — wrote on X. Trump, he added, “is 200 percent right,” describing Zelenskyy as a “bankrupt clown.”
Russia’s ambassador to the U.K., Andrei Kelin, also celebrated the U.S. pivot. “For the first time we have noticed that they are not simply saying that this is Russian propaganda and disinformation,” he told the BBC.
“They have listened and they hear what we’re saying,” Kelin said.
Trump suggested this week that Ukraine’s long-time desire to join NATO was a major cause for Russia’s 2022 invasion. The assertion won him more praise in Russia.
“He is the first, and so far, in my opinion, the only Western leader who has publicly and loudly said that one of the root causes of the Ukrainian situation was the impudent line of the previous administration to draw Ukraine into NATO,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told lawmakers.
Like Moscow, Trump and his domestic allies appear to be presenting Zelenskyy as a key impediment to peace.
Vice President JD Vance said the Ukrainian leader’s “badmouthing” of Trump was an “atrocious” way to interact with the administration.
“We obviously love the Ukrainian people,” he told the Daily Mail. “We admire the bravery of the soldiers, but we obviously think that this war needs to come to a rapid close.”
“That is the policy of the President of the United States,” Vance said. “It is not based on Russian disinformation. It’s based on the fact that Donald Trump, I think, knows a lot about geopolitics and has a very strong view, and has had a strong view for a very long time.”
Trump confidante Steve Bannon, meanwhile, told Italy’s La Repubblica newspaper he believed Zelenskyy is “finished.”
“Of course, if he decides to accept the terms of the agreement with Russia, he will be welcome, but he no longer has the power to dictate them,” Bannon said.
Russian officials, meanwhile, also framed Kyiv as the key impediment to peace.
“The Ukrainian side is practically ready to use any tool that will be aimed at stopping or preventing dialogue and preventing the search for a scenario for a political and diplomatic settlement,” Rodion Miroshnik, an ambassador-at-large for Russia’s Foreign Ministry, told state television on Thursday, as quoted by Russia’s state-run Tass news agency.
Several of Kyiv’s European partners, meanwhile, expressed deep concern over the the latest developments.
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer “stressed the need for everyone to work together,” in a statement, expressing “his support for President Zelenskyy as Ukraine’s democratically elected leader.” Starmer said it was “perfectly reasonable to suspend elections during war time as the U.K. did during World War II.”
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said it was “simply wrong and dangerous to deny President Zelenskyy democratic legitimacy.”
ABC News’ Molly Nagle and Patrick Reevell contributed to this report.
(NEW YORK) — A personalized mRNA vaccine may reduce the risks of pancreatic cancer returning after surgery, according to a preliminary study published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
Pancreatic cancer is one of the most aggressive cancers, with a typical survival rate of only about a year after the diagnosis according to the study.
While the findings are encouraging, the vaccine is still in early testing and will likely take years before it becomes widely available — assuming ongoing trials continue to show success, according to Dr. Vinod P. Balachandran, lead investigator of the trial and senior author of the study.
In this small, preliminary trial of 16 patients, half had a strong immune response to the vaccine. Most of these responders remained cancer-free for more than three years, much longer than those who didn’t respond.
The vaccine works by training specialized immune system cells, known as T cells, to recognize and attack the cancer.
Researchers couldn’t track tumor shrinkage because all patients had surgery to remove visible cancer before vaccination. However, they found that the vaccine produced long-lasting T cells that may keep fighting cancer for years.
“This is one way through which you can make lots of T cells, and you can make these T cells such that they can persist for a long time in patients and retain their function,” Balachandran said.
Balachandran said “to be able to get an immune response has been very challenging,” especially when an illness like pancreatic cancer typically does not respond to vaccines, which highlights the significance of these findings.
A larger trial is now underway to confirm the results. If successful, this approach could lead to new ways to treat or even prevent pancreatic and other advanced cancers.
Overall, Balachandran said this study can “provide some important clues on how you would be able to develop vaccines more broadly for other cancers.”
“Hopefully this information that we will learn from these clinical trials will give us information to know apply vaccines in other settings, such as primary prevention, meaning preventing cancers from occurring even before they occur, with vaccines or perhaps also using it to treat patients who have more advanced disease,” Balachandran said.
A view of the destruction after Russian forces launched a guided aerial bomb (KAB) attack, in Kherson, Ukraine on February 19, 2025. As a result of attack fifteen apartments were destroyed. At least 6 people wounded, including two 14-year-old children. (Photo by State Emergency Service of Ukraine/Handout/Anadolu via Getty Images)
(LONDON) — Ukraine’s air force said Russia launched 14 missiles and 161 drones into the country in a massive overnight bombardment, as President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warned against Russian deception in revived peace talks.
Ukraine’s air force said it shot down 80 of the drones launched in the latest Russian barrage, with another 78 lost in flight without causing any damage. The 14 missiles targeted energy infrastructure, the air force said, adding it would not reveal how many were intercepted.
Ukrainian Energy Minister German Galushchenko wrote on Facebook that Russia conducted a “massive” missile and drone attack on “gas infrastructure.”
The aim of the “criminal attacks” was to “stop the production of gas, which is necessary to provide citizens’ household needs and centralized heating,” he said.
“While Russia continues to blatantly lie about not attacking civilian critical infrastructure, we are witnessing multiple missiles targeting Ukrainian gas mining facilities at once,” Galushchenko wrote.
“Such actions of the enemy prove only once again that Russia is trying to hurt ordinary Ukrainians, plunged into the cold in the middle of winter,” he added. “This is outright terrorism.”
Russia’s Defense Ministry, meanwhile, said its strike targeted “gas and energy infrastructure facilities that ensure the operation of the military-industrial complex of Ukraine.”
“The strike’s objective has been achieved,” the ministry said. “All facilities have been hit.”
Russia’s long-range strikes into Ukraine have not eased despite the opening of talks with President Donald Trump’s administration aimed at ending Moscow’s three-year-old full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
The talks began this week in Saudi Arabia without Ukrainian participation, Kyiv’s exclusion prompting condemnation in Ukraine and across Europe.
Such criticism appeared to irk Trump, who this week criticized European allies and the Ukrainian leadership for having failed to end Russia’s war. The president went on to call Zelenskyy a “dictator without elections,” claiming — without providing evidence — that his Ukrainian counterpart’s public approval rating was as low as 4%.
Trump also wrote on Truth Social that Zelenskyy “better move fast or he is not going to have a country left.”
Zelenskyy, meanwhile, suggested Trump is in a “disinformation space,” attributing at least some of the U.S. leader’s criticism to Russian disinformation campaigns.
On Thursday, Zelenskyy marked the anniversary of the culmination of Ukraine’s 2014 Maidan Revolution — in which pro-Western protesters overthrew Moscow-aligned President Viktor Yanukovych.
“It was in these days of 2014 that Russia chose war — it began the first steps towards the occupation of Crimea,” Zelenskyy wrote on Telegram. “While people were being killed in Kyiv, and people were defending their freedom, Putin decided to strike another blow.”
“Since then, the world has been living in a new reality, when Russia is trying to deceive everyone,” the president wrote. “And it is very important not to give in, to be together. It is very important to support those who defend freedom.”
Ukraine is continuing its own long-range campaign against Russian military and industrial infrastructure, especially targets linked to the country’s lucrative fossil fuel industry. Ukrainian security services have referred to the campaign as “drone sanctions.”
Russia’s Defense Ministry said on Thursday that its forces shot down 13 Ukrainian drones over the previous 24 hours.
ABC News’ Nataliia Popova, Oleksiy Pshemyskiy and Fidel Pavlenko contributed to this report.
(LONDON) — Hamas handed over four bodies to the Red Cross in Gaza on Thursday, in the latest return of deceased hostages as part of the group’s ceasefire deal with Israel.
Red Cross officials took custody of four black coffins during a ceremony in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis. A Red Cross official and a Hamas commander appeared on a stage to sign documents as part of the handover. The coffins were also brought onto the stage.
A banner on the stage declared in both Arabic and English: “The Return of War = The Return of Your Prisoners in Coffins.”
In a joint statement, the Israel Defense Forces and Israel Security Agency said that, “According to information communicated by the Red Cross, four caskets of deceased hostages were transferred to them, and they are being taken to IDF and ISA forces in the Gaza Strip.”
An Israeli security official confirmed to ABC News that an IDF-held ceremony for the four deceased hostages took place in the IDF-controlled Gaza buffer zone before the coffins were brought across the border into Israel.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office released a statement confirming Israel’s receipt of the bodies. “The families of the abductees have been informed and our hearts go out to them at this difficult time,” the statement said.
“The public is asked to respect the families’ privacy and refrain from spreading rumors and information that is not official and well-founded,” it added.
Israel and Hamas have confirmed the names of the four bodies that are set to be returned to Israel Thursday: Oded Lifshitz, a journalist and peace activist and Shiri Bibas and her two children — Ariel and Kfir Bibas. Once the bodies are back in Israel, the Israeli officials will conduct forensic analysis to confirm the identities of the bodies.
During the handover, Hamas released a statement that read in part, “To the families of Bibas and Lifshitz: We would have preferred your sons to return to you alive, but your army and government leaders chose to kill them instead of bringing them back.”
“They killed with them: 17,881 Palestinian children, in their criminal bombardment of the Gaza Strip, and we know that you know who is truly responsible for their departure,” the statement added. “You were the victim of a leadership that does not care about its children.”
Kfir Bibas was 8 1/2 months old when he was kidnapped by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023 — the youngest of the 251 hostages taken on the day the group carried out its terror attack on Israel — the worst in the country’s history. In the ensuing war, more than 48,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza.
Oded Lifshitz’s wife, Yocheved, was among the first few hostages released during the first ceasefire agreement in November 2023. Sixty-nine hostages remain in Gaza after Thursday’s release.
“At this difficult time, our hearts go out to the grieving families,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement.
The Hostage Families Forum called for the second stage of the three-stage ceasefire to proceed, saying there is “no time to waste.” In the second phase of the ceasefire agreement — which should last 42 days — Israel is to completely withdraw its forces from the Gaza Strip. Hamas and Israel also agreed to a permanent cessation of all military operations and hostilities before all remaining Israeli hostages, civilians and soldiers are released by Hamas in exchange for Palestinian prisoners.
“We received the heart-shattering news that Shiri Bibas, her children Ariel and Kfir, and Oded Lifshitz are no longer with us. This news cuts like a knife through our hearts, the families’ hearts and the hearts of people all over the world,” the families of the hostages said in a statement Wednesday.
“We grieve not only for them, but for the other precious lives lost, including four more deceased hostages who will be returned next week,” families of hostages said.
Six other hostages are expected to be released on Saturday and four more bodies will be returned to Israel next week. The hostages who will be released on Saturday have been identified as Eliya Cohen, 27; Tal Shoham, 40; Omer Shem Tov, 22; Omer Wenkrat, 23; Hisham Al-Sayed, 36; and Avera Mengistu, 39, according to Israeli officials and the Hostages and Missing Families Forum.
Negotiations to set the terms for the second phase of the ceasefire have not started, but mediators are pushing to have talks begin as soon as possible to allow enough time for discussion before the second phase is expected to begin (the first phase is expected to last 42 days), Qatar’s foreign ministry said on Tuesday. Hamas has accused Israel of avoiding negotiations and says it’s ready to negotiate.
Last week, Hamas threatened to not release hostages over the weekend, saying Israel was not holding up its end of the ceasefire by delaying the return of displaced Palestinians to northern Gaza.
Hamas later said the exchange would take place as planned and released three hostages this past Saturday.
ABC News’ Jordana Miller contributed to this report.
