The Institute of Forensic Medicine reported on Tuesday evening, according to the Hebrew Broadcasting Corporation (official) and Channel 13 (private), that samples of remains it received from Gaza on Tuesday did not belong to either of the two remaining prisoners’ bodies in the Strip.
The institute said that "the samples sent from Gaza do not belong to the remains of any of the two remaining slain abductees."
But the Israeli Ministry of Health said in a later statement: "Contrary to what has been published, the identification process at the Institute of Forensic Medicine is still ongoing."
She called for "obtaining information only from official sources."
Earlier on Tuesday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office said in a statement that "Israel received samples of remains transferred from the Gaza Strip via the Red Cross, and they were handed over to the army and the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) inside the Strip."
The statement explained that the samples will be received in a military ceremony involving a military rabbi, before being transferred to the National Center for Forensic Medicine of the Ministry of Health for the necessary examinations.
He added that if the identity of the owner of the remains is confirmed to be that of one of the prisoners in Gaza, his family will be officially notified.
As of 14:31 (GMT), Hamas had not commented on the statement from Netanyahu's office, but Husam Badran, a member of its political bureau, said on Sunday in an interview with Al Jazeera that "the issue of the bodies is a pretext used by the Israeli occupation to avoid fulfilling its obligations."
Badran continued: “In numbers, the resistance only has two bodies left, one of an Israeli and the other of a foreign worker, but the occupation, with its usual racism, only talks about the Israeli’s body.”
Tel Aviv is conditioning the start of negotiations to launch the second phase of the ceasefire agreement on receiving all the bodies of prisoners, while there are 9,500 missing Palestinians killed by the Israeli occupation army, and their bodies are still under the rubble of the houses that were destroyed during the war of extermination, according to the Government Media Office in Gaza.
On October 10th, a ceasefire agreement between Hamas and Tel Aviv went into effect, intended to end an Israeli offensive that left more than 70,000 Palestinian martyrs and approximately 171,000 wounded. However, Israel repeatedly violated the agreement, causing further casualties among Palestinian civilians, while Hamas declared its commitment to the terms and called on mediators to compel Tel Aviv to implement them.
