The Israeli army said in a statement: "After the National Center for Forensic Medicine completed the identification procedures, in cooperation with the Israel Police and the Military Rabbinate, army representatives informed the family of the late kidnapped Ran Gweli that their loved one had been returned for burial."
He added: “According to the information and intelligence data available to us, Ran Gweli, a policeman in the Special Patrol Unit of the Police (Yasam), who was 24 years old at the time of his death, was killed in battle on the morning of October 7, 2023, and his body was taken to the Gaza Strip.” He announced that “with that, all those abducted from inside the Gaza Strip have been returned.”
For its part, Hamas stated that "the resistance made great efforts in the search for the body of the last prisoner, and provided the mediators with the necessary information on a regular basis, which contributed to being able to find him."
The movement added in a statement that "this step comes within the framework of the resistance's full commitment to the requirements of the first phase of the ceasefire agreement," which went into effect on October 10th.
The movement called for pressure to be exerted on the occupation to "complete the implementation of all the terms of the ceasefire agreement, without any reduction or delay, and to fulfill all the obligations arising from it."
Earlier today, local sources reported that the Israeli occupation army continued at dawn on Monday to search for the remains of prisoner Rani Ghweili in a mass grave containing dozens of Palestinian bodies in the Al-Tuffah neighborhood, which witnessed a significant Israeli escalation of shelling and gunfire on Sunday
The Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, announced on Sunday that it had briefed mediators on all the details it had regarding the location of the body of the last Israeli prisoner in the Gaza Strip.
She indicated that the Israeli occupation army is conducting searches at one of the sites based on that information, while the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday that army forces are conducting a large-scale search for the remains of the last captive in a cemetery in the northern Gaza Strip based on information provided by the Qassam Brigades to the mediators.
Since the start of the first phase of the ceasefire agreement, the Palestinian factions had handed over 20 living Israeli prisoners and the remains of 27 others, while the remains of Ghweli, whose remains were found today, were still missing.
Since the agreement came into effect, continued Israeli violations have resulted in the martyrdom of 484 Palestinians and the injury of 1,321 others.
The agreement ended a war of extermination that Israel began on October 8, 2023, which lasted for two years, leaving more than 71,000 martyrs and more than 171,000 wounded, and massive destruction that affected 90 percent of the civilian infrastructure, with reconstruction costs estimated by the United Nations at about $70 billion.
