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Hamas has returned the body of another hostage, Israeli officials said, as part of a US-brokered deal meant to end the devastating two-year war in Gaza.
The office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Saturday that the body had been identified as that of Eliyahu Margalit, a 75-year-old who was killed during Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, before militants took his body to Gaza.
The latest return, which was carried out with the help of the Red Cross, means that — in addition to releasing the final 20 living hostages it held in Gaza — Hamas has now returned the remains of 10 hostages since a fragile ceasefire took effect in the Palestinian enclave just over a week ago.
But 18 hostage bodies are yet to be returned and the pace of the transfers has become an early source of strain on the deal. As part of the agreement, Israel freed 1,900 Palestinians, including 250 serving life sentences and 1,700 Gazans it had seized and held without charge since the start of the war.
Israeli officials have accused Hamas of returning the bodies too slowly, and threatened to limit the amount of humanitarian aid allowed into Gaza in an effort to pressure the militant group to accelerate the returns. They also expressed anger after forensic tests showed one body returned this week was not the body of an Israeli hostage.
On Saturday, a forum representing the families of hostages said it would “not rest until all 18 [dead] hostages are brought home”.
Hamas has said that it remained committed to the terms of the ceasefire deal brokered by US President Donald Trump, but that the scale of devastation in Gaza had made locating and returning bodies — some of which were thought to be buried under rubble — difficult.
Trump warned this week that he would allow Israel to resume fighting if the bodies of all the hostages were not returned. But US officials have said that the pace at which bodies are being returned is in line with what they had expected, given the level of destruction in Gaza.
Hamas was meant to return the remains of all the dead hostages at the same time as the final living captives by noon on Monday. But in cases where it could not locate bodies, the deal allowed for it to share information about dead hostages and try to hand their bodies over as soon as possible.
Progress on other parts of the ceasefire deal, which also requires a surge of humanitarian aid into Gaza, have also been slow. OCHA, the UN’s humanitarian arm, said on Friday that “much more can be done once more crossings are opened, basic infrastructure is restored, NGO access is facilitated, and looting further reduces”.
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