The videos prompted Trufanov’s family to call on Israeli authorities to do more to secure his release.
PIJ, a militant group that operates in Gaza alongside Hamas, released the first video on Tuesday.
In the short clip, Troufanov speaks calmly and in Hebrew.
He said: “In the coming days, you will hear the truth about what happened to me and other prisoners in Gaza,” according to a Jerusalem Post translation.
“Wait patiently,” he said.
The context in which he speaks is unclear. Hostages are rarely able to express themselves freely in such videos.
The Hostages and Missing Families Forum, a hostage advocacy group, released a statement on Islamic Jihad, after 235 days. in captivity, showing Alexsander Trufanov.
(The statement used a variant spelling of Trufanov’s name.)
He argued that the apparent evidence of his life should prompt the Israeli government to do more to reach a deal on the return of the hostages to Gaza.
Trufanov was kidnapped from Kibbutz Nir Oz alongside his grandmother Irena Tati, mother Yelena and girlfriend Sapir Cohen during Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7, The Times of Israel reported in December.
His mother, grandmother and girlfriend were released in November, Israeli media Haaretz reported.
Troufanov’s father was killed in these attacks, the report added.
The first video showing Troufanov gave no indication of when it was filmed.
In a second video, released Thursday by PIJ, Troufanov appears to refer to the Israeli government’s shutdown of the Al Jazeera news channel’s operations in the country on May 5, according to the Times of Israel, suggesting that the footage taken after this date.
Troufanov worked as an engineer at Annapurna Labs, a subsidiary of Amazon, according to his LinkedIn profile.
The Israeli chipmaker was acquired by Amazon Web Services in 2015 in a deal that was reportedly worth up to $370 million.
Russian news agency TASS reported that the country’s chief rabbi, Berl Lazar, said in February that Russian President Vladimir Putin was aware of Trufanov’s situation and was working to help free the hostages in Gaza .
Putin “has all the information about the hostages who have Russian nationality. There are three of them, and Alexander Trufanov is just one of them,” the rabbi said, according to Tass.
It comes as President Joe Biden unveiled a new Israeli proposal aimed at ending the conflict in Gaza.
The three-step proposal offers a “road map to a lasting ceasefire – and the release of all hostages,” reads the president’s X account.
The plan, presented to Hamas by Qatar, would begin with a ceasefire and the withdrawal of Israeli forces from populated areas of the Gaza Strip.
It would also include an exchange of Palestinian prisoners for Israeli hostages, a “surge” of humanitarian aid and a reconstruction plan for Gaza.
Hamas said it viewed the proposal “positively.”
So far, more than 36,000 Palestinians have been killed in the conflict, according to figures from Gaza’s health ministry. Around 1,200 people were killed in Israel during the Hamas attacks on October 7, and around 240 others were taken hostage in Gaza.
The PIJ is the second armed group in Gaza after Hamas
Members of the Al-Quds Brigades, the armed wing of Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Photo by Ashraf Amra/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
According to the US Director of National Intelligence, the PIJ is a “Sunni Islamist militant group seeking to establish an Islamist Palestinian state”.
The group’s military wing, the al-Quds Brigades, has been involved in multiple attacks against Israel since the 1990s – primarily small arms, mortar and rocket attacks launched from Gaza, according to the DNI.
Although the PIJ has frequently worked with Hamas, the two groups remain rivals, with ideological differences and occasional disagreements over their strategies toward Israel.
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