Israel has handed over unidentified and mutilated bodies of Palestinians to authorities in Gaza, even as it continues to block food shipments over Hamas’s alleged failure to properly return hostages.
Hundreds of aid lorries are lining up at the closed Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt, as Israel sends mixed signals about whether it will allow humanitarian convoys to enter the famine-stricken territory under a ceasefire deal.
The army’s open use of food as a weapon has drawn less attention than Israel’s frustration over its inability to identify a body handed back by Hamas. Israel said one of the four bodies handed over late on Tuesday did “not match any of the hostages”.
Gaza's health authorities meanwhile said they received the bodies of another 45 Palestinians released by Israel through the Red Cross on Wednesday, under the ceasefire deal that provides for the exchange of dead and living captives.
Health officials in Gaza were seeking help to identify the bodies, some of which are badly damaged. The Palestinian Centre for Missing and Forcibly Disappeared Persons said that while “some of the bodies were delivered intact, others were only partial remains”.
The centre said this raised “serious concerns about the circumstances of their deaths and the conditions of their detention”. It urged Israel to “close this deeply humanitarian file and not link it to any political or military considerations”.
Under the ceasefire deal brokered by US President Donald Trump, Israel was to turn over the bodies of 15 Palestinians for every deceased Israeli returned. Israel has now released 90 bodies to Gaza.
It is not known whether the deceased died in Israeli custody or were taken from Gaza by Israeli troops. Gaza's Health Ministry said medical teams were examining and documenting the bodies before they could be handed over to families.
The back and forth over the bodies is the latest setback to the ceasefire deal hailed by Mr Trump as a new dawn for the Middle East after two brutal years of war. While aid deliveries have increased they are still below the level that aid workers say is needed to end Gaza's humanitarian crisis.
Hamas has also been accused of carrying out executions since Israeli troops' withdrawal to an agreed line. The Palestinian Authority, which partly governs the Israeli-occupied West Bank, said dozens of people had been killed by Hamas.
US Admiral Brad Cooper, the head of the Central Command that covers the Middle East, told Hamas to seize the “historic opportunity for peace” by “fully standing down” and laying down its weapons. A disarmament plan is still to be negotiated in the next phases of the peace deal.
“We have conveyed our concerns to the mediators who agreed to work with us to enforce the peace and protect innocent Gaza civilians,” the admiral said. “We remain highly optimistic for the future of peace in the region.”
Late on Tuesday Hamas released four bodies after Israel told it to pick up the pace of the handover. However, the Israeli army said on Wednesday that one of them is not that of any of the people kidnapped by the group on October 7, 2023.
Military officials confirmed the remains could not be identified after examinations at the National Centre for Forensic Medicine. “Hamas is required to make all necessary efforts to return the deceased hostages,” the Israeli army said.
The identities of former hostages Ouriel Baruch, Eitan Levy and Tamir Nimrodi were confirmed by their families in statements on social media on Wednesday.
A hostage group said Mr Nimrodi, who was an Israeli soldier, was killed by Israeli strikes while in captivity in Gaza. “Tamir was kidnapped alive from his base and killed by [Israeli military] bombings in captivity,” the Hostages and Missing Families Forum said.
The remains were handed over to the Red Cross after Israel said it would halve the number of aid lorries allowed into Gaza to punish Hamas for breaching its agreement to return all the dead hostages under the ceasefire deal reached last week.
On Monday, Hamas handed over first four of the 28 dead hostages it was holding. The military confirmed the identities of all four and named two as Guy Iluz, a 26-year-old Israeli, and Bipin Joshi, a 22-year-old student from Nepal.
On the same day, Hamas freed all 20 of the surviving Israeli hostages it had been holding since October 7, 2023, as part of the ceasefire agreement brokered by the US President Donald Trump. In return, Israel released 1,968 mostly Palestinian prisoners and detainees, the prison service said.
The Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu demanded earlier on Wednesday that Hamas fulfil all requirements laid out in the ceasefire deal about the return of the hostages' bodies. “We will not compromise on this and will not stop our efforts until we return the last deceased hostage, until the last one,” he said.
The entry of humanitarian aid to Gaza was paused for the past two days due to the prisoner and hostage exchange on Monday and a Jewish holiday on Tuesday.
On Wednesday morning, Egypt’s state-run AlQahera News television channel reported that aid lorries will move from Egypt towards the crossing with Israel where the aid undergoes a security inspection by Israeli forces before entering Gaza.
The Israeli defence body overseeing humanitarian aid in Gaza, Cogat, notified humanitarian groups on Tuesday it would allow into Gaza only half of the 600 daily aid lorries called for under the deal as a response for the slow release of the dead hostages.
However, an Israeli officials said on Wednesday that 600 aid lorries would enter and that preparations were under way to open the Rafah crossing with Egypt to Gazans who need to leave the territory for medical treatment.
The 20-point ceasefire plan calls for the same amount of aid to enter Gaza as in a previous ceasefire this year – 600 lorryloads daily.
