Bodies of 15 Palestinians returned by Israel to Gaza
Officials of Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis said that Israel returned the bodies of 15 Palestinians to the Gaza Strip, which was the final step in fulfilling the terms of the ceasefire agreement brokered by the United States.
The bodies were returned after militants late Thursday handed over the body of one of the last four Israeli hostages taken in the Oct. 7, 2023 attack that launched the war in the Gaza Strip.
Israel determined that the returned body belonged to Meny Godard, who was kidnapped from Kibbutz Be’eri in southern Israel.
His wife Ayelet was killed in the attack.
The armed wings of Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad said Godard’s body was found in the south of the Gaza Strip.
The remains of 25 hostages have been returned to Israel since the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas began on October 10.
There are still three more people in the area who need to be rescued and handed over.
Hamas returned 20 live hostages to Israel on October 13.
In exchange for every hostage returned, Israel released the remains of 15 Palestinians who were at the center of the first phase of the ceasefire.
According to Gaza health ministry officials, the overall number of Palestinian bodies received so far is 330, of which only 95 have been officially identified.
Also on Friday, the bodies of 27 unidentified Palestinians were buried in Deir al-Balah.
Gaza’s Ministry of Health said 182 unidentified Palestinians had already been buried.
Health officials in the region said identifying remains returned by Israel was complicated by a lack of DNA testing kits.
Talks continued even as Israel and Hamas accused each other of violating other terms of the agreement.
Israel accused Hamas of handing over some remains in some cases and staging the discovery of bodies in others, while Hamas accused Israel of opening fire on civilians and restricting the flow of humanitarian aid to the region.
United Nations human rights chief Volker Turk on Friday joined the chorus condemning a series of recent attacks by Israeli settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank, calling for an end to the violence and for Israel to hold perpetrators accountable.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Wednesday there were concerns that events in the West Bank “could undermine what we are doing in Gaza.”
Israeli officials have tried to portray the settler violence as the work of a few extremists, but Palestinians and human rights groups say the violence is widespread and carried out by settlers in the area, but that the Israeli government, led by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has not commented on the increase in violence, has acted with impunity.
Meanwhile, the Palestinian Ministry of Health in the West Bank said that six young people aged between 15 and 17 had been shot and killed by Israeli fire in four separate incidents in the past two weeks.
In the latest incident on Thursday, two 15-year-old boys were killed near the village of Beit Ummar.
The Israeli army said that in three out of four incidents its soldiers were responding to “terrorists” throwing Molotov cocktails or explosives or were in the process of carrying out a “terrorist attack”.
In one incident, the army said soldiers acting according to “standard operating procedures” opened fire on stone-throwing Palestinians to “eliminate the threat.”
The next sections of the 20-point plan call for the creation of an international stabilization force, the establishment of a technocratic Palestinian government and the disarmament of Hamas.
The agreement aims to end the war triggered by a Hamas attack on southern Israel that killed nearly 1,200 people and took 251 hostages.
Israel responded with a military offensive in the Gaza Strip that killed more than 69,100 Palestinians, according to the Gaza health ministry.
