Hamas returns bodies as fragile Gaza ceasefire holds

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Hamas released what it said were the bodies of two Israeli hostages on Saturday night as part of a US-brokered deal meant to end the devastating two-year war in Gaza.

The handover took place as Gaza’s authorities said Israeli forces had killed at least nine people, including three women and four children, when they opened fired on a vehicle in Gaza City on Friday.

It was the deadliest in a series of killings of Palestinians by Israeli forces since a fragile ceasefire took effect in the enclave last week.

Israel’s military said soldiers had opened fire after a vehicle crossed the “yellow line”, behind which the Israeli forces withdrew as part of the ceasefire agreement, and approached them in a way they said posed an “imminent threat”.

There was no immediate confirmation of the identities of the two bodies handed over on Saturday night. There have been instances — including one earlier this week — in which Hamas has returned bodies which forensic tests have shown did not belong to hostages.

The Israeli military said the two bodies had been handed over to the Red Cross, and would be transferred to Israeli forces in Gaza.

Earlier on Saturday, the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that a body returned by Hamas on Friday night was that of Eliyahu Margalit, a 75-year-old who was killed during Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, before militants took his remains to Gaza.

The return of Margalit’s body meant that — in addition to releasing the final 20 living hostages it held in Gaza — Hamas has returned the remains of 10 of the 28 dead hostages it still held when the truce took effect.

But 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.

Netanyahu’s office also said on Saturday that the Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt would remain closed until further notice, and that its reopening would depend on Hamas returning the bodies of the dead hostages.

Hamas has said that it remains committed to the terms of the ceasefire deal brokered by US President Donald Trump, but that the scale of devastation in Gaza has 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, including 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”.