Israel receives coffin Hamas says contains body of Gaza hostage

Israel received a coffin through the Red Cross that Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad said contained the body of one of Gaza’s last three hostages, according to the Prime Minister’s Office.

The Israeli army will now transfer the body to the Israeli National Forensic Center in Tel Aviv for identification.

Earlier, the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement and Hamas announced that the body of an Israeli hostage was found in central Gaza on Monday.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office warned that it “takes seriously the delay in the immediate transfer” of the bodies, calling it a “further violation” of a six-week-old Gaza ceasefire.

Following the handover of central Gaza on Tuesday afternoon, the office announced that the families of the three hostages had received appropriate updates.

“Our thoughts are with them at this difficult time,” the statement added. “Efforts to repatriate the hostages are ongoing and will not stop until the last hostage has been repatriated.”

Under the first phase of the U.S.-brokered ceasefire agreement that came into effect on October 10, Hamas agreed to return within 72 hours the 20 living Israeli hostages still in Gaza and the bodies of 28 dead Israeli and foreign hostages.

On 13 October, all living hostages were released in exchange for 250 Palestinian prisoners and 1,718 detainees from Gaza.

So far, the bodies of 22 Israeli hostages have been handed over, as well as those of three hostages, including a Thai, a Nepali and a Tanzanian.

In exchange, Israel handed over the bodies of 330 Palestinians killed in the war.

Of the three remaining hostages, two are Israelis – 24-year-old Ran Gvili and 48-year-old Dror Or – and the other is Thai – 43-year-old Suthisak Rintalak.

Israel accuses Hamas of deliberately delaying the recovery of the bodies, while Hamas insists it is working to find them beneath the rubble.

Slow progress means no progress has been made on the second phase of President Donald Trump’s Gaza peace plan. This includes plans for Gaza governance, Israeli withdrawal, and Hamas disarmament and reconstruction.

The dead hostages still in Gaza are among 251 people kidnapped and around 1,200 killed in the Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.

Israel’s military campaign in Gaza has killed more than 69,770 people, according to the Hamas-controlled health ministry.