The army said in a statement: "After completing the diagnostic procedures at the National Institute of Forensic Medicine in cooperation with the Israel Police and the Military Rabbinate, army representatives informed the family of the kidnapped Staff Sergeant Lior Rodayev that his body had been returned to Israel."
He added that "according to the information and intelligence received, Staff Sergeant Lior Rodayev, who served in the battalions of the rapid intervention team commander in the town (settlement) of Nir Yitzhak, was killed during the battle to defend the town, and his body was kidnapped on October 7, 2023, by the Islamic Jihad organization."
On Friday evening, Israel received the body of one of its prisoners from the Palestinian factions via the Red Cross in the Gaza Strip, after the Al-Quds Brigades and the Al-Qassam Brigades announced their intention to hand over the remains of an Israeli prisoner, after he was found in the city of Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip.
For his part, Hamas spokesman Hazem Qassem said in a statement that "the relevant authorities in the movement are continuing their efforts to complete the exchange process related to handing over the remaining bodies of the occupation prisoners, despite the great difficulties and complications."
Thus, since the first phase of the ceasefire agreement came into effect on October 10, the Palestinian factions have handed over 20 living Israeli prisoners and the remains of 24 others out of 28.
But Israel claimed that one of the bodies it received did not belong to any of its prisoners, and that the remains of another were not new but were the remains of a prisoner whose remains had been received previously.
Israel is conditioning the start of negotiations to launch the second phase of the agreement on receiving the remaining bodies of the prisoners, while Hamas asserts that it will take time to retrieve them due to the massive destruction in Gaza.
In contrast, there are 9,500 missing Palestinians killed by the occupation army, and their bodies are still 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, and many of them have been killed, according to Palestinian and Israeli human rights and media reports.
The ceasefire agreement halted an Israeli genocidal war on Gaza that began on October 8, 2023, leaving approximately 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 around $70 billion.
