As the Palestinian group calls on mediators and the international community to compel Israel to open border crossings and allow aid in, Hamas has handed over the remains of an additional captive it recovered from the ravaged Gaza Strip.
Without providing further details about where the body was recovered, Hamas’ armed wing, the Qassam Brigades, claimed in a statement released on Friday that its fighters had handed the remains at 11 p.m. local time (20:00 GMT).
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The group claimed that an “occupation prisoner” was the source of the remains, which suggested that they belonged to an Israeli rather than one of the several other captives of various nationalities that Hamas also took on October 7, 2023.
Shortly after that, Hamas’ hands of a captive’s coffin to Israel were handed over to the Red Cross, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office confirmed that the country had received it.
Before the family is informed, the coffin will be moved to Israel’s Ministry of Health’s National Center for Forensic Medicine, where a formal identification procedure will be carried out.
The Israeli military urged the general public to “wait for the official identification” and act with sensitivity. Additionally, it stated that “Hamas is required to uphold the agreement and take the necessary steps to return all the deceased hostages.”
Hamas has stated that it is adhering to the terms of the US-mediated ceasefire, including the transfer of captive bodies still unaccounted for beneath Gaza’s ruin. It has repeatedly stated that it has recovered all of the bodies, but that it still needs assistance finding the bodies of the captives who have been buried beneath the rubble as a result of Israeli strikes.
According to Al Jazeera’s Hamda Salhut, who was based in Amman on Friday, “There are still 18 bodies inside Gaza.” “Hamas says they’re waiting for the assistance they need, in the form of teams on the ground and heavy machinery,” he says.
Israel is “not cooperating,” according to the statement.
Alon Liel, the ex-Israeli ambassador, claimed the country is feeling a lot of emotional pressure as it receives the bodies of the dead prisoners.
He claimed that Hamas had violated the ceasefire agreement by failing to return all of the dead’s bodies to Israel. There is a lot of rage, Liel said.
In a statement released earlier on Friday, Hamas claimed that some captives’ remains were hidden in abandoned buildings or tunnels and that heavy machinery was needed to dig through rubble to retrieve them. Israel claimed that it had not permitted any additional bulldozers into the Gaza Strip, making up the blame for the delay.
Only a small number of Palestinians attempt to clear significant amounts of rubble across the bombarded territory as a result of the war’s destruction of the majority of the heavy equipment in Gaza.
Nour Odeh, a reporter for Al Jazeera from Amman, claimed that Israel is “not cooperating with nations that are assisting us in the search for those remains.”
For instance, Turkey was prepared to send 81 experts into the body retrieval, but Israel did not permit it to do so. Additionally, it has forbidden it from providing any additional resources that might help that, Odeh said.
As Hamas searched for captives’ remains in Khan Younis’s Hamad City, a complex of apartment towers, on Friday, two bulldozers dug up pits in the earth. During the war, Israeli forces repeatedly bombarded the towers, toppling some, and troops carried out a weeklong raid there in March 2024.
If Hamas doesn’t live up to its end of the bargain and returns all 28 of the dead’s bodies, US President Donald Trump has warned Hamas that he will authorize Israel to reengage in the conflict in Gaza. Hamas has so far handed over the remains of nine captives and a tenth body that Israel claims was not a captive.
More than 10,000 slain Palestinians are still trampled across the enclave, according to Gaza’s civil defense, who returned the 10th dead on Friday. To date, only 280 items have been recovered.
Hamas has urged mediators to speed up reconstruction, facilitate the opening of the Rafah border crossing with Egypt, and ensure the flow of essential aid into Gaza. Israel is still operating in about half of the Gaza Strip as attacks continue in some areas despite the ceasefire agreement reached last week.
Source: Aljazeera
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