Israel received through the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) one of the last four bodies held hostage by Palestinian Hamas or its allies in Gaza, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office announced on Thursday evening, November 13.
The Israeli army later clarified that the coffin, handed over by the ICRC to soldiers in the Gaza Strip, had been transferred to Israel and was on its way to the National Institute of Forensic Medicine in Tel Aviv for an autopsy to identify the body.
Earlier, the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, and the al-Quds Brigades, the military branch of Islamic Jihad, announced that they would return the remaining hostages in the evening. Hamas said the body was discovered during the day near Khan Younes, in the southern Gaza Strip.
Since the start of a ceasefire that went into effect on October 10 under pressure from the United States after more than two years of war in Gaza, the Palestinian Islamist movement has freed 20 surviving hostages in exchange for the release of nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners, and has begun repatriating the remains of the dead.
Before handing over the bodies on Thursday evening, Hamas had handed over the bodies of 24 of the 28 dead hostages they had promised to return to Israel as part of the ceasefire agreement. The remains of the final four hostages are three Israeli citizens and a Thai worker who were kidnapped in the bloody October 7, 2023 attack that sparked the war.
