Israel’s military on Thursday confirmed the identities of the remains of two more hostages returned by Hamas, the latest from the Palestinian militants in the ceasefire agreement.
Late Thursday, the office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that the remains were those of Sahar Baruch and Amiram Cooper, who were both captured during the 7 October 2023, Hamas attack that sparked the conflict.
“The Government of Israel shares in the deep sorrow of the Cooper and Sahar families and all the families of the fallen hostages,” it said in a statement.
According to the Israeli military, the two sets of remains were given to the Red Cross in Gaza before being transported into Israel by troops and taken to the National Institute of Forensic Medicine for identification.
Baruch was readying to pursue an electrical engineering degree when he was taken hostage from Kibbutz Be’eri. His brother, Idan, was killed in the attack. Three months into Sahar’s captivity, the Israeli military said he was killed during an attempted rescue mission. He was 25.
Cooper was an economist and one of the founders of Kibbutz Nir Oz. He was captured along with his wife, Nurit, who was released after 17 days. In June 2024, Israeli officials confirmed that he had been killed in Gaza. He was 84.
So far, Hamas has now returned the remains of 17 hostages since the start of the ceasefire, with 11 others still in Gaza and set to be turned over under the terms of the agreement.
In return, Israel has returned the bodies of 195 Palestinians to authorities in Gaza without providing details on their identities. It is unclear if they were killed in Israel during the 7 October attack, died in Israeli custody as detainees or were recovered from Gaza by troops during the war.
Health officials in Gaza say they have struggled to identify the bodies without access to DNA kits.
Gaza officials say 40 injured from strikes
Meanwhile, officials in southern Gaza said Thursday that at least 40 people had been injured in overnight strikes, after Israel declared the ceasefire was back on Wednesday morning.
Mohammad Saar, head of the nursing department at Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza, said it received 40 people wounded in overnight strikes on Khan Younis.
The Israeli army said it carried out strikes on “terrorist infrastructure that posed a threat to the troops” in Khan Younis. The area in southern Gaza is under the control of the Israeli military.
Israel claimed it was retaliating for the shooting and death of one of its soldiers in Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city, following strikes earlier this week that killed over 100 people.
According to Netanyahu, Hamas had broken the agreement’s clause pertaining to the return of hostage remains.
Hamas denied any involvement in the deadly shooting and, in turn, accused Israel of violating the ceasefire deal.
“If Hamas continues to blatantly violate the ceasefire, it will experience powerful strikes, as it did the day before yesterday and yesterday,” Netanyahu said Thursday during a graduation ceremony for military commanders in southern Israel.
He vowed Israel would “act as needed” to remove “immediate danger” to its forces.
“At the end of the day, Hamas will be disarmed and Gaza will be demilitarised. If foreign forces do this, all the better. And if they don’t, we will do it.”
Reports say the guarantors of the fragile ceasefire deal in Gaza told Hamas that Israel will begin military operations on targets inside the Israeli-occupied zone of the Palestinian territory and that they will not protest after a deadline for militants to leave the area expired Thursday.
The ceasefire, which went into effect on 10 October, aims to end the war triggered by the 2023 attack on Israel by Hamas-led militants, who killed about 1,200 people, sparking an Israeli onslaught that killed over 65,000 Palestinians, — a conflict that’s by far the bloodiest and most damaging of all time between both sides.