The army said the 21-year-old woman of Yazidi origin was rescued ina coordinated and complex operation this week that involved co-operation with the United States, Jordan and other international partners.
“She was recently rescued in a secret mission from the Gaza Strip through the Kerem Shalom crossing,” the military said in a statement.
“Upon her entry into Israel, she continued to Jordan through the Allenby Bridge crossing and from there returned to her family in Iraq.”
The Iraqi foreign ministry confirmed the woman’s return, praising the co-operation between the United States and Jordan following more than four months of “efforts and follow-ups”.
“The girl was handed over to her family after returning to Iraq,” the ministry said, without making any mention of Gaza or Israel.
Brigadier General Elad Goren of Cogat, the Israeli military body responsible for civil affairs in the Palestinian territories, charged that the woman had been sold to a Hamas member by Isis jihadists.
He did not provide specific details on how the woman was moved from Iraq to Gaza but said it was most likely through the Rafah border crossing from Egypt.
“Isis sold her to one person from Hamas, but she’s been held by a group from Hamas,” Goren alleged at a briefing.
“[It’s] further proof of the ideological links between Hamas and Isis,” he claimed.
Israeli officials have repeatedly tried to equate the Palestinian militant group which has ruled Gaza since 2007 with the jihadists of Isis, whose extreme interpretation of Sunni Islam saw them target not only non-Muslim communities like Iraq’s Yazidis but also Shiite Muslims.
Israeli soldiers rescued a 21-year-old Yazidi woman from captivity in Gaza. Photo / AFP
Goren said the woman was physically healthy “but not in a good mental situation”, following the rescue operation.
“She wasn’t hurt physically but we understand that the experience she had was terrible,” he told reporters.
Isis jihadists carried out horrific violence against the Yazidi minority as they rampaged across Iraq in 2014, killing men en masse and abducting thousands of girls and women.
The women were repeatedly raped and shared out among jihadist fighters as sex slaves in a reign of terror qualified as genocide by UN investigators.
After the massacres, some 100,000 Yazidis fled to Europe, the United States, Australia and Canada, according to the United Nations.
The Israeli military has been fighting against Hamas in Gaza since its unprecedented attack on Israel almost a year ago which resulted in the deaths of 1205 people, according to an AFP tally.
Israel’s retaliatory military offensive in Gaza has killed at least 41,788 people, the majority of them civilians, according to figures provided by the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry.
