The bitter deal on the Israeli and Palestinian bodies

As the countdown begins to the release of twenty living hostages held in Gaza, Israel is preparing for an even more horrific task: retrieving the remains of its dead from the Palestinian territories.

It’s a task that has consumed Israel since Hamas’s cross-border attack on October 7, 2023, when the militant group returned 250 prisoners to Gaza.

Early in the Gaza war, when Israeli soldiers began exploring the underground world of Hamas’ tunnels in the Strip, a small commando unit was given the harrowing task of collecting samples from the bodies they found in the dark, in case DNA analysis later showed they were dead hostages.

Then, as the Israeli military took control of larger parts of the besieged Strip, its bulldozers dug up Palestinian cemeteries — human rights groups have documented at least four such excavations — and exhumed hundreds of bodies if hostages were among them.

Recovering the bodies of their fallen comrades – at any cost – has long been a totem of Israeli security doctrine. But it is also seen as a community pledge for Israeli parents who send their children into combat.

To this day, the Israeli military searches in Syria for the remains of Eli Cohen, a Mossad spy who was discovered and hanged in Damascus in 1965. Israeli commandos returned his watch in 2018, and in 2025, the new Syrian authorities quietly announced that they had agreed to return the archives of his possessions to calm tensions.

But in the bitter history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the fate of the dead has been a constant source of tension — and pain — as each side collects the bodies of its enemies and extracts a price.

Hamas is responsible for handing over the bodies of at least 28 hostages along with those living under Donald Trump’s 20-point peace plan for Gaza. Israel is also scheduled to release the remains of 15 deceased Gazans for every one of them – a horrific calculation that reflects the disparity in the war’s toll.

“The deceased hostages will be given a proper Jewish burial,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Friday. “We will work to locate them all as soon as possible – and we will do so as a sacred duty of societal responsibility.”

Although, according to the US President’s letter of agreement, Hamas has until Monday to return the hostages, two Israeli officials said there is an understanding that not all of the dead may be recovered by then.

An annex to the agreement, which aims to finally end the war, also calls for the creation of a special task force for deceased hostages led by Gal Hirsch, an Israeli brigadier general.

According to an official in Israel, the task force will consist of Israeli, American, Egyptian, Turkish and Qatari representatives who will be responsible for locating the remaining bodies that Hamas cannot, or will not, find.

Israel has found and recovered the bodies of at least 50 hostages so far during the war. In August 2024, the army found the bodies of six dead hostages hidden inside a false wall during a two-day raid in Khan Yunis. Eight others were released under ceasefire agreements.

Meanwhile, Israel is holding up to 2,000 Palestinian bodies, and perhaps more, according to media reports and a non-governmental organization called the National Campaign to Recover the Bodies of Martyrs.

This includes at least 726 from the occupied West Bank – most of them before the current war – buried in so-called number cemeteries, where graves can only be identified in a file kept by the army so that families do not know which grave to pray in.

Several Israeli newspapers reported that Israel is also holding at least 1,500 bodies from Gaza, frozen in morgues across the country — most of them in an imposing concrete building in Tel Aviv called the Abu Kabir Institute of Forensic Medicine.

The accumulation of remains is a trauma inflicted by both enemies on the other, and a source of debate among religious Palestinians and in Supreme Court cases brought by liberal Israelis.

However, the outrageous bargaining continued. For example, Israel and Hamas have negotiated for nearly a decade over the bodies of two Israeli soldiers from the 2014 war in Gaza, with Netanyahu sometimes displaying photos of the duo on his desk.

The body of one of them, Oron Shaul, was found during secret excavations during this war and returned to his grateful mother.

“They promised us they would locate our son,” said Leah Goldin, the mother of the second soldier, Hadar, whose remains have not yet been recovered. “Send Israeli operational rescue missions to locate the missing people – and do not release even a single Hamas (member) until then.”

These inspections were the responsibility of two Israeli military units. One of them, Yashar, works in the midst of the fighting to recover the soldiers’ bodies.

The other, Eitan, trained algorithms that sift through terabytes of data collected by Israeli drones to find evidence of modern graves.

In theory, said a reservist who served in the unit, the drones capture data high enough to discern the shape of the new mound, and even the type of plants growing above a new, unmarked grave.

But he said that this strategy proved ineffective in this conflict. He added: “In Gaza, there were graves everywhere, and bodies everywhere.”

Hagai Levin, who heads the health team for a group that supports families in Israel, said the families of those whose deaths are confirmed are seeking a solution that only burial can provide.

He added: “For them, the nightmare continues and will not end until they know for sure what happened to their loved ones, and they will be able to confirm it and return it for burial.”

“Some of them realize they may be dead, but they still have hope. They really need that closure.”

Additional reporting by Neri Zilber