Published On 5/11/2025
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Last update: 23:22 (Mecca time)
The Al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas), announced – Wednesday evening – that it had handed over the body of an Israeli prisoner to the International Committee of the Red Cross, after it was found in the Shujaiya neighborhood (east of Gaza City), in a new step within the ongoing understandings between Hamas and the mediators.
The Brigades said in a statement on its Telegram channel that they found the body of a prisoner of the occupation army during field searches carried out in Shujaiya, with the participation of a team from the Red Cross and engineering vehicles belonging to the Egyptian Committee in the Gaza Strip.
The office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes in Gaza – confirmed that Israel had received the remains of an Israeli detainee from the Red Cross in Gaza.
In Tel Aviv, the families of Israeli prisoners called on the government not to move to the second phase of the agreement with Hamas before recovering all the bodies, stressing that recovering the remains is a “humanitarian and national priority.”
Since the start of the agreement on October 10, Hamas has released 20 prisoners alive and handed over the bodies of 21 others out of 28, and 6 bodies of soldiers may remain inside the Gaza Strip, according to Israeli estimates.
Israel is conditioning the start of the second phase of negotiations on the receipt of the rest of the bodies, while Hamas asserts that this process requires a great deal of time and effort, given the massive destruction in Gaza that impedes access to burial sites, demanding that mediators provide equipment and technical personnel to retrieve the bodies from under the rubble.
The handover of the body today is the 22nd since the ceasefire last October 10, and the efforts of the mediators are still continuing to stabilize the calm and push negotiations towards implementing the rest of the terms of the agreement.