Shot in the head in a hospital - and the body was hidden in the wall: The shocking kidnapping of Hanan Yablonka

Shtetl
July 20, 2026   
Photo: 
Courtesy of the family

Avivit Yablonka Abadi, the sister of Hanan Yablonka, a 42-year-old abductee who was murdered by the terrorist organization Hamas, revealed today (Sunday) in a conversation with the Daily Mail how her brother was brutally shot in the chest and then dragged by terrorists onto a truck to the Gaza Strip.

There, she said, he was executed by firing squad while lying in a hospital bed.

Yavlenka was then placed in a bag and hidden within the walls of a Hamas tunnel in the northern Gaza Strip, alongside the bodies of other hostages.

The nurse said that Hamas terrorists put Hanan on a truck and took him to a hospital inside Gaza, but when the doctors saw that he was dying, they decided to shoot him three times in the head.

They then put his body in a bag and hid it within the walls of a tunnel in Jabaliya.

Hanan's tragic fate remained unknown to his desperate family for almost eight months, until the IDF located his body in a special operation, and returned him to Israel alongside the bodies of Orion Hernandez and Michel Nissenbaum.

A few hours before his death, Hanan made a spontaneous decision to go to the Nova Festival without telling his family.

Sister Avivit was part of a group of survivors, freed captives, and family members who came to London this month for the opening of the Nova exhibition, which presented an interactive timeline of the events as they unfolded.