Israel Accepts Remains of Hostage Returned by Hamas

Return of a body under the ceasefire exposes the fragility of a hard-won pause

The slow handover of a single body from Gaza to Israeli custody this week read like a terse footnote in an unfolding diplomatic script — yet it carries disproportionate moral and political weight. Israeli military spokespeople confirmed to the Red Cross that a coffin containing the remains of a hostage was being transferred back to Israeli forces, part of commitments tied to the U.S.-brokered ceasefire plan. Hamas, meanwhile, said it had recovered another body and warned that heavy machinery was needed to excavate others buried under rubble.

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Small, procedural acts like this — the lifting of a coffin, the exchange of lists, the mechanical clearing of collapsed buildings — are being treated as tests for a broader bargain: the first phase of a 20-point U.S. plan that has at least paused large-scale fighting and returned 20 living hostages earlier in the week. Yet both sides trade accusations about who is delaying what, and for whom the clock is really running out.

Bodies, hostages and the politics of closure

Israel says it has now received nine of the 28 bodies believed to be held in Gaza; Hamas says technical hurdles are slowing recovery. For families on both sides, these are not just statistics but searing realities — rituals of mourning interrupted by war, and a painful demand for closure that intersects with national security calculations and court-of-public-opinion battles.

“According to information provided by the Red Cross, a coffin of a deceased hostage has been transferred into its custody and is on the way to IDF troops in the Gaza Strip,” the Israeli army said in its terse statement. For relatives, that transfer is an event heavy with relief and renewed anguish. For negotiators, it is a symbolic barometer of how much trust remains between enemies who only weeks ago traded rocket barrages and air strikes.

Humanitarian needs dwarf the currently possible aid flow

Even as vehicles cross into Gaza under the ceasefire, humanitarian organisations stress that the scale of need remains catastrophic. The World Food Programme says it has averaged about 560 tonnes of food per day into Gaza since the pause — materially important, but far short of what is required to avert famine-like conditions in parts of the enclave.

WFP spokesperson Abeer Etefa described the work as “a narrow window of opportunity,” and highlighted the logistical nightmare of getting supplies northwards. “Access to Gaza City and northern Gaza is extremely challenging,” she said, noting that convoys must navigate damaged roads, blocked routes and closed crossings. Yesterday’s 57-truck delivery to southern and central Gaza was called a “breakthrough,” but still below the roughly 80–100 trucks a day that would be needed to meet urgent needs.

The World Health Organization has warned of spiralling infectious diseases while only 13 of Gaza’s 36 hospitals are even partially functioning. The territory’s health ministry, run by Hamas, reports nearly 68,000 dead — a toll the U.N. considers credible — with more than half of the victims women and children. Whatever the eventual political settlement, the humanitarian calculus is brutally simple: supply lines, sanitation, and medical infrastructure must be rebuilt urgently, or more lives will be lost to malnutrition and disease than to guns.

International law, politics and the long shadow of the ICC

On a parallel track, the International Criminal Court rejected Israel’s request to appeal arrest warrants issued for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant — a decision that has already fuelled diplomatic storms. The November ruling that found “reasonable grounds” to believe senior Israeli officials bore criminal responsibility for actions in Gaza produced outrage in Israel and pushback from Washington. The court’s recent refusal to permit an interlocutory appeal leaves the legal question unresolved and politically charged.

For negotiators planning Gaza’s future, the ICC decision complicates what many officials want to treat as a separate, practical question: how to stabilise the territory, disarm militant groups, and rebuild governance structures. Can political reconstruction be insulated from legal battles that proponents on both sides claim will shape behaviour at the negotiating table?

Plans for an international stabilisation force: hope, caution and logistics

France, Britain and the United States are working on a U.N. Security Council text to underpin a possible international stabilisation mission in Gaza — not a traditional U.N. peacekeeping deployment but a robust, mandate-backed force that could include “all necessary measures” to enforce its terms. Diplomats say potential contributors include Indonesia, the UAE, Egypt, Qatar, Azerbaijan and Italy; Indonesian leaders have even spoken publicly about the possibility of tens of thousands of troops if a U.N. resolution is adopted.

Yet turning that idea into an effective instrument will be fiendishly difficult. Who commands such a force? Whose rules of engagement will apply in densely populated urban environments scarred by months of conflict? And crucially, how will local Gazans view an international presence that is, by design, temporary and operating amid contested claims of sovereignty?

So what comes next?

The ceasefire has opened a narrow space — for aid, for diplomacy, for legal wrangling — but none of these tracks is guaranteed to converge on a durable outcome. Disarmament, governance, reconstruction and accountability are four separate, often contradictory ambitions packaged as parts of a single plan. As diplomats debate resolutions in capitals and corridors of the United Nations, ordinary people in Gaza and Israel face the daily arithmetic of survival and memory.

Is the international community prepared to match political declarations with the logistics, funding and political courage required to prevent another collapse? Can a stabilisation force protect civilians and enable reconstruction without becoming a geopolitical battleground itself? These are the questions that will determine whether this fragile pause becomes a turning point, or simply a prelude to renewed violence.

By Abdiwahab Ahmed
Axadle Times international–Monitoring.

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