A Red Cross official confirmed that its personnel joined Hamas officials into areas of Gaza still under IDF control to support the hunt for the remains of individuals held captive.
Under the truce negotiated by the United States, which began on 10 October, the group is required to return the remains of all captives promptly. As a reciprocal measure, Israel has agreed to hand over the remains of 15 Palestinians for every Israeli body returned.
Hamas has to date handed back the remains of 15 of those taken hostage but zero in the past five days, as a portion of those bodies are thought to be in locations past the ceasefire boundary designating Gaza’s ceasefire.
“Upon the appeal of the parties, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) accompanied a party to the conflict as the party looked for the bodies of the deceased individuals past the military-established ‘yellow boundary’,” said a spokesperson for the organization.
The spokesperson continued: “The parties to the conflict established the procedures of the mission and entrusted the ICRC to act as a impartial mediator. We was not involved in the discussions.”
She further explained: “Our team was not involved in the physical hunt for the deceased nor does it engage in the physical recovery of human remains.”
According to global legal norms, it is the responsibility of the sides involved in a hostilities to search for, gather, and recover the bodies of the deceased.
On Saturday, the American leader delivered a 48-hour demand to the militant group. “Hamas is going to have to begin returning the bodies of the deceased hostages, including two Americans, promptly, or the other countries participating in this great peace will take action,” he wrote on his social‑media platform.
When the 48-hour deadline neared, the group, joined by the ICRC, joined Egyptian teams, who were granted permission by Israeli authorities to search for remains past the boundary marking the withdrawal of troops inside Gaza. An Israeli spokesperson said the delegation would use heavy machinery and trucks in the operation.
The news was supported by an source within Israel, who told Hebrew-language media that members of the group had been allowed to access sections of Gaza under military authority to look for the bodies of hostages, together with Egypt’s and Red Cross teams.
“To achieve this goal, Hamas members were permitted to pass the yellow line,” the source was quoted as saying.
Footage released by a media outlet seemed to show members of a specialized group – part of the organization’s armed faction tasked with holding captives – escorting a humanitarian transport in a specific location close to a southern city, which is beyond IDF jurisdiction.
Efforts to locate for the remains of individuals taken captive has become one of the most delicate matters in the truce agreed between the two sides. However, the effort to locate the remains has proved challenging from the outset, given the existence of an approximate 60m tonnes of debris across the territory, where, according to health officials, at least 10,000 Palestinians are recorded as missing, buried under the debris.
Hamas has claimed it lacks information on the precise whereabouts of all the remains, saying it has lost contact with a number of its teams that had been holding the captives and were reportedly eliminated during military strikes.
In contrast, an Israeli government spokesperson asserted that the organization knew the locations of the remains. “If Hamas exerted greater effort, they would be able to retrieve the bodies of our hostages,” the official said.
While the US president has conceded that some of the bodies are hard to reach, he said that “others they can hand over now and, for some reason, they are not.”
“This could be related to the surrender of weapons of the group,” he added.
The US administration has said it has obtained assurances from Hamas that the group will disarm, though no specific schedule has been established. They remains hesitant to give up its weapons without solid assurances about the future of its members.
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