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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 handover took place as Gaza’s authorities said Israeli forces killed at least nine people, including three women and four children, when they opened fired on a car in Gaza City on Friday. It was the latest in a series of killings since a fragile ceasefire took effect in the Palestinian 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”.
The office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Saturday that the body returned on Friday night 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 hostage 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 the truce took effect.
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”.
It was also unclear when the Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt would reopen. The Palestinian embassy in Egypt said on Saturday that the crossing would open on Monday for Palestinians returning to Gaza.
But Netanyahu’s office said it would remain closed until further notice, and that its reopening would depend on Hamas returning the bodies of the dead hostages.
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