The bodies returned for the final time to the villages that, in life, they had called home. Months of anguished waiting at an end, mourners embraced, wept, read tributes and lowered into the soil the remains of Israeli hostages recovered this week from the Gaza Strip.

But grief had to share space with fury at Israel’s leaders, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for not agreeing to a ceasefire with Hamas that might have saved the captives’ lives.

“You were abandoned, again and again, by the Prime Minister and his ministers, to Hamas’ tunnels,” Keren Munder — herself a former hostage — said as she buried her father, Abraham Munder, on Wednesday in his hometown, Nir Oz.

Distant explosions and crackles of gunfire occasionally interrupted her eulogy, reminders of the war between Israel and Hamas, now in its 11th month.

Israeli forces this week recovered the bodies of six of the people taken hostage in the Hamas-led October 7 assault on Israel: Abraham Munder, 79; Haim Peri, 80; Yoram Metzger, 80; and Alexander Dancyg, 75, all from Nir Oz; and Nadav Popplewell, 51; and Yagev Buchshtab, 35, both from a nearby community, Nirim.

It remains unclear precisely when or how they died. On Thursday, the Israeli military said forensic pathologists had tentatively concluded that the bodies of all six hostages showed signs of gunfire, but did not say whether the shots were fatal.

New York Times News Service