Israel reported to know location of 9 out of 13 deceased hostages still held in Gaza

Top Hamas negotiator said that the terror group won’t give up its weapons, even though the US-brokered pact says they would. According to a source from Sunday, Israel doesn’t know where four of the 13 hostages’ bodies are in Gaza. This comes as pressure on Hamas grows to start giving up bodies again as part of the truce and hostage deal.

Days have gone by without Hamas giving up the bodies of any more dead hostages, therefore Jerusalem has been attempting to get Washington to understand how important it is to get the rest of the bodies back from the Strip, according to the Kan national radio.

In the past week, a number of high-ranking US officials, including Vice President JD Vance, have gone to the area to help keep the tenuous ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.

Kan said that during Vance’s visit, IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir tried to get him to understand how important it was to return the bodies by telling him that Israel has been looking for the remains of Hadar Goldin, a soldier who was killed in 2014 and whose body is one of the 13 that have not yet been found.

Hamas says it hasn’t been able to find the bodies of some of the other 13 hostages yet and hasn’t returned any bodies since Tuesday. It says it needs help finding and getting them back. But Israel is sure that the terrorist group can give them additional bodies, but they won’t, and they are also keeping information about where they are, which is a clear violation of the October 9 hostage-ceasefire deal. Donald Trump, the President of the United States, has made the same claim.

On Sunday, workers from the Red Cross and Egypt worked together to look for remains, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s permission.

An unidentified Israeli official told Hebrew-language media that Hamas representatives had been allowed to enter IDF-controlled areas in Gaza to look for the dead. This was in addition to the work being done by the Egyptian and Red Cross. The Qatari Al-Araby uploaded video showed Hamas members, said to be from the group’s armed wing’s “Shadow Unit,” which is in charge of protecting hostages, along with a Red Cross vehicle in al-Mawasi, which is near Rafah and not under IDF control.

Trump cautioned on Saturday that Hamas would be to responsible if the ceasefire broke down. He said he would be examining the group’s conduct “very closely” over the next 48 hours to make sure they started giving over bodies again.

Hamas had the bodies of 28 dead hostages before the truce. Since then, it has given back 15 of them and freed all 20 of the 251 hostages who were taken during the Hamas-led slaughter in Israel on October 7, 2023, which started the war in Gaza.

However, the delay in getting the dead prisoners back didn’t seem to be the only threat to the shaky ceasefire. A prominent Hamas leader said on Sunday that the group wouldn’t disarm until the Israeli “occupation” was finished.

As part of the US-brokered deal with Israel, Hamas will have to give up its weapons and stop being involved in running Gaza during the second phase of the plan’s implementation.

Israel has also made it a major priority to disarm Hamas and has said that doing so is one of the main goals that must be reached in order to conclude the two-year war in Gaza. Hamas’s main negotiator, Khalil al-Hayya, said on Sunday that the group’s weaponry were “linked to the presence of the occupation and aggression.”

He said, “These weapons will be given to the state if the occupation ends.”

It wasn’t obvious right away which state the Hamas official was talking about, or if he was talking about the Palestinian administrative body that hasn’t been constituted yet that will take over Gaza from Hamas.

Al-Hayya’s description of “the occupation” was also ambiguous. He didn’t say if he meant Israel’s presence in Gaza and the West Bank or the whole State of Israel, as Palestinians and some Arab countries generally just call it an occupying force.

Trump’s 20-point plan for Gaza says that Hamas must agree to disarm, yet the deal that Israel’s Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer and mediators made in Sharm el-Sheikh on October 9 does not mention this condition.

Last week, defense officials told Israeli lawmakers that the International Stabilization Force, which is supposed to take over security in the Gaza Strip after the IDF leaves, will probably include troops from Pakistan. This was in response to a different part of Trump’s plan for Gaza.

A source on the Ynet news site says that members of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee were briefed in a private meeting last week that the International Stabilization Force will include soldiers from Indonesia, Azerbaijan, and Pakistan.

Indonesia has said in public that it will deploy troops to help, and authorities have told The Times of Israel that Azerbaijan has also promised to send forces.

Source: https://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-said-to-know-location-of-9-out-of-13-deceased-hostages-still-held-in-gaza/

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