Israel’s defence minister has said the country could resume fighting if Hamas does not honour the terms of the ceasefire deal
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Hamas has announced that the remains of all the deceased Israeli hostages that it can reach have been handed back and it would need specialist recovery equipment to retrieve the rest from Gaza’s ruins, amid threats from Israel to resume fighting if the terms of ceasefire are not honoured.
Two further bodies were handed over late on Wednesday, after Hamas had already returned the remains of seven of 28 known deceased hostages – along with an eighth body which Israel said was not that of a former hostage.
Soon after, the Ezzedine Al-Qassam Brigades said in a statement on social media that the group had “fulfilled its commitment to the agreement by handing over all living Israeli prisoners in its custody, as well as the corpses it could access … as for the remaining corpses, it requires extensive efforts and special equipment for their retrieval and extraction.”
Since Monday, under a ceasefire agreement brokered by US president Donald Trump, Hamas has handed back 20 surviving hostages to Israel in exchange for nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners freed from Israeli jails.
Israel’s defence minister threatened on Wednesday to resume fighting if Hamas does not honour the continuing terms of the deal.
“If Hamas refuses to comply with the agreement, Israel, in coordination with the United States, will resume fighting and act to achieve a total defeat of Hamas, to change the reality in Gaza and achieve all the objectives of the war,” a statement from Israel Katz’s office said.
Seeking to keep the pressure on Hamas, Trump said he would consider allowing Israeli forces to resume fighting in Gaza if Hamas fails to uphold its end of the ceasefire deal that he brokered.
“Israel will return to those streets as soon as I say the word. If Israel could go in and knock the crap of them, they’d do that,” Trump was quoted as saying to CNN in a brief telephone call when asked what would happen if Hamas refused to disarm.
After the threat from Katz, senior US advisers briefed the media late on Wednesday that Hamas was aiming to stick to its pledge to return the bodies of dead hostages.
Retrieving the bodies from Gaza was difficult because it had been “pulverised,” the advisers said, adding “here was a lot of disappointment and outrage when only four bodies were returned, and they could have just said, you know, we’re moving on … But they returned bodies the next day and then the next day, as quickly as we give them intelligence.”
The US and other mediators were looking at a program of rewards for people helping locate the bodies of dead hostages, he said. Turkey, one of the key mediators in the deal, was meanwhile in talks to provide experts on body retrieval to send to Gaza, the adviser added.
Aid trucks rolled into Gaza on Wednesday and preparations resumed to open the main Rafah crossing on Thursday, but Israel has warned it could keep the crossing shut and reduce aid supplies if Hamas returned bodies too slowly.
Underscoring the political challenges facing Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, far-right national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, an opponent of the ceasefire plan, said on X that the aid delivery was a “disgrace” and accused Hamas of lies over the return of hostages’ bodies.
Aid agencies and the United Nations are calling for Israel to open more crossings to allow “thousands of trucks” to enter the devastated territory every day.
Tom Fletcher, the UN’s most senior relief coordinator, called on Israel to facilitate the “massive surge of humanitarian aid – on which so many lives depend, and on which the world has insisted”.
“We need more crossings open and a genuine, practical, problem-solving approach to removing remaining obstacles. Throughout this crisis, we have insisted that withholding aid from civilians is not a bargaining chip. Facilitation of aid is a legal obligation,” Fletcher said.
Aid agencies say thousands of tonnes of aid, including food and medical supplies, has been loaded on to trucks waiting in Egypt or stockpiled elsewhere in the region. It is the only border point that connects Gaza to the world without passing through Israel.
Israel has repeatedly blocked aid from entering Gaza during the conflict, prompting accusations it has used starvation as a weapon of war. A famine was declared in parts of the territory in August.
Humanitarian officials in Gaza City said on Wednesday assistance was desperately needed, with hundreds of thousands of people without clean water, food and other essentials and many more suffering greatly.
The deal also requires Israel to return the bodies of 360 Palestinians. Many of the 90 bodies returned by Israeli authorities so far showed signs of torture and execution, including blindfolds, cuffed hands and bullet wounds in the head, according to doctors’ accounts.
“Almost all of them had been blindfolded, and had been bound up and they had gunshots between the eyes. Almost all of them had been executed,” said Dr Ahmed al-Farra, the head of the Nasser hospital’s paediatric department in Khan Younis.
The dispute over the return of bodies still has the potential to upset the ceasefire deal along with other major issues that are yet to be resolved.
Israel has said that the next phase of the truce calls for Hamas to disarm and cede power, which it has so far refused to do. It has launched a security crackdown, parading its power in Gaza through public executions and clashes with local clans.
With Agence France-Presse and Reuters
