The office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed in a statement that "Israel received, through the Red Cross, a coffin containing the remains of one of the abductees after it was handed over to the Israeli army and Shin Bet forces inside Gaza."
The statement added that "the remains will be received in Israel with a military ceremony accompanied by a rabbi, before being transferred to the National Center for Forensic Medicine of the Ministry of Health, to verify the identity of the prisoner," noting that "after the process of verifying the identity of the owner of the remains is completed, his family will be officially notified."
Netanyahu's office concluded by saying: "Efforts to bring back our kidnapped citizens are ongoing and will not stop until the last kidnapped person returns," as he put it.
Earlier on Tuesday evening, the Qassam Brigades and the Al-Quds Brigades, the military wing of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, announced their intention to hand over the remains of an Israeli prisoner after they were found in the middle of the Gaza Strip.
Thus, since the start of the first phase of the ceasefire agreement on October 10, the Palestinian factions have handed over 20 living Israeli prisoners and the remains of 28 others, which is the full number of bodies they have, according to their announcements.
However, Israel claimed that one of the bodies it received did not belong to any of its prisoners, and that another set of remains was not new but rather the remains of a prisoner whose body had previously been recovered.
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 maintains 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 Israeli 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 halted an Israeli genocidal war on Gaza that began on October 7, 2023, which left 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.
