Israeli military says body handed over by Hamas is not a hostage

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TEL AVIV, Israel — The Israeli military said Wednesday that one of the bodies handed over to Hamas yesterday as part of a ceasefire agreement was not that of a hostage being held in the Gaza Strip, raising tensions over a fragile truce in the two-year war.

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Hamas handed over four bodies on Tuesday to ease pressure on the ceasefire, following four bodies on Monday – hours after the last 20 living hostages were released. In total, Israel is awaiting the return of the bodies of 28 dead hostages.

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Israel, which released some 2,000 Palestinian prisoners and detainees on Monday, is also handing over Palestinian bodies under the agreement. This step is awaited by many families in the Gaza Strip whose relatives disappeared during the war.

The military said that after “examinations at the National Institute of Forensic Medicine, the fourth body handed over to Israel by Hamas does not match any of the hostages.” There was no information about whose body it was.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu earlier on Wednesday demanded that Hamas comply with demands laid out in a ceasefire agreement presented by US President Donald Trump for the return of the hostages' bodies.

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“We will not compromise on this issue and will not stop our efforts until we return the last dead hostage, every last one,” Netanyahu said.

Return of all living and dead hostages

The ceasefire plan proposed by the US called for the handover of all hostages – living and dead – by a Monday deadline. But according to the agreement, if this did not happen, Hamas was to share information about the deceased hostages and try to hand them over as quickly as possible.

This is not the first time Hamas has returned the wrong body to Israel. Earlier this year, during a previous ceasefire, the group said it had handed over the bodies of Shiri Bibas and her two sons. Israelis suffered another moment of agony when testing revealed that one of the returned bodies was identified as a Palestinian woman.

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A day later, Bibas' body was returned and identified.

Hamas and the Red Cross said returning the remains of the dead hostages was a difficult task due to the massive destruction in the Gaza Strip, and Hamas told truce mediators that some were in areas controlled by Israeli troops.

Hazem Kassem, a Hamas spokesman, said on the Telegram app on Wednesday that the group was working to return the hostages' bodies as agreed in the ceasefire agreement. He accused Israel of violating the agreement by shooting Tuesday in eastern Gaza City and the territory's southern city of Rafah.

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said on Wednesday that the military was operating along deployment lines called for in the agreement and warned that anyone approaching the deployment line would be attacked – as happened to several militants on Tuesday.

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Two hostages whose bodies were released from the Gaza Strip were due to be buried on Wednesday. The family invited the public to gather along the road this afternoon to escort the body of one hostage from the forensic institute to a cemetery north of Tel Aviv.

In addition, forensic experts in the Gaza Strip on Wednesday began identifying 45 Palestinian bodies that Israel had handed over the previous day through the Red Cross without identification. Israel is expected to hand over more bodies, although the total number has not been announced.

It was not immediately clear whether the bodies were those of people who died in Israeli prisons or bodies taken from the Gaza Strip by Israeli troops. During the war, the Israeli military exhumed bodies as part of the search for the remains of hostages.

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Gaza desperately needs help

The flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza has been suspended for the past two days due to the exchange of prisoners and hostages on Monday and the Jewish holiday on Tuesday.

The Egyptian Red Crescent said 400 trucks carrying food, fuel and medicine headed to the Gaza Strip on Wednesday as Israel and Hamas sparred over the slow return of the bodies of dead hostages.

The Israeli defense body overseeing humanitarian aid in Gaza, COGAT, notified aid organizations on Tuesday that it would only allow half of the 600 daily aid trucks allowed into Gaza under the deal.

It was not immediately clear whether he would carry out the threat. COGAT declined to comment on the number of trucks expected to enter the Gaza Strip on Wednesday.

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On Monday, Israelis celebrated the return of the last 20 living hostages in the Gaza Strip, while Palestinians celebrated Israel's release of some 2,000 prisoners and detainees as part of the first phase of a ceasefire.

Families of the hostages and their supporters have expressed dismay in recent days that so few of the dead hostages have been released. Hamas and the Red Cross said returning the remains of the dead hostages was a difficult task due to the massive destruction in the Gaza Strip, and Hamas told truce mediators that some were in areas controlled by Israeli forces.

The first four bodies released were identified as hostages, and from the second group of four bodies three were identified as Uriel Baruch, Tamir Nimrodi and Eitan Levi.

Baruch was kidnapped from the Nova music festival during the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, which sparked the war in the Gaza Strip.

Nimrodi, who served in the Israeli defense agency overseeing humanitarian aid in the Gaza Strip, was captured by militants at the Erez border crossing. The Hostage Families Forum, a group representing many of the hostage families, says Levy was kidnapped while taking a friend to Kibbutz Be'eri during the Hamas attack.

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