The official said that President Donald Trump's administration has intensified its pressure on Hamas in recent days to return Golden's body, with the aim of opening a negotiating path leading to an agreement that would get the fighters trapped in the Rafah tunnels out.
He added that the plan preferred by Washington begins with the handover of the body, followed by the handover of Hamas fighters’ weapons, and granting them safe passage either to areas controlled by the movement or to a third country.
The channel reported that the next phase involves the targeted destruction of the tunnels that held the fighters, as part of a broader arrangement to end the crisis. Meanwhile, the Israeli newspaper Maariv quoted an Israeli source as saying that American pressure to secure a safe passage for those trapped is primarily aimed at maintaining the stability of the ceasefire that went into effect on October 10.
Israeli reports estimate that approximately 200 fighters are trapped in the Israeli-controlled Rafah area. Yedioth Ahronoth also reported that Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir expressed his willingness to withdraw these fighters in exchange for the return of the body of Hadar Goldin, held by the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades since 2014.
Israeli officials have stated that the trapped fighters have only two options, as they put it, to surrender or face death inside the tunnels.
In contrast, there are 9,500 missing Palestinians killed by the occupation army, and their bodies remain under the rubble of the Israeli war of extermination, according to the Government Media Office in Gaza.
More than 10,000 Palestinian prisoners, including children and women, are held in Israeli prisons, where they suffer torture, starvation, and medical neglect. Many of them have been killed, according to Palestinian and Israeli human rights and media reports.
The ceasefire agreement ended an Israeli war of genocide on Gaza that began on October 8, 2023, leaving more than 69,000 Palestinian martyrs and more than 170,000 wounded, most of them children and women, with reconstruction estimated by the United Nations to cost about $70 billion.