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Ben-Gvir demands 'destroy' Hamas, urges Netanyahu to resume Gaza genocide

Iran Press TV

Tuesday, 28 October 2025 5:24 PM

Far-right Israeli minister Itamar Ben‑Gvir accused Hamas of "playing games" over the remains of Israeli captives and urged Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to "give the order" to resume full‑scale war on Gaza, insisting the resistance group must be annihilated.

In a social‑media post on Tuesday, Ben‑Gvir said "the fact that Hamas continues to play games and does not immediately transfer all the bodies of our fallen, is in itself evidence that the organization is still standing."

"Now we don't need to 'extract a price from Hamas' for the violations. We need to exact from it its very existence and destroy it completely, once and for all, in accordance with the central goal defined for the 'war of revival' [war in Gaza]," he said, adding: "Mr Prime Minister, enough hesitation. Give the order."

Israel's extremist finance minister Bezalel Smotrich reinforced the pressure in a written appeal to Netanyahu, demanding "forceful responses" and the "destruction of Hamas and the removal of the threat emanating from Gaza."

Meanwhile, Netanyahu said Israel would respond after Hamas handed over human remains that, he claimed, did not belong to the missing captives.

He added that the remains handed over overnight were of a captive whose body, he said, Israeli forces had already recovered earlier during their aggression in Gaza.

Israeli officials have since said they will not move forward with subsequent phases of the US‑brokered plan until the remaining 13 bodies are brought back to the occupied territories.

Hamas has stated that it was complying with the ceasefire and doing its best to locate the remains of the hostages, but that its efforts were hampered by a lack of equipment to properly identify the bodies.

The Israeli regime was previously blocking equipment needed to recover captives' bodies while complaining that the resistance delays delivering them.

Hamas has been working in cooperation with the Red Cross and Egyptian teams for the past 48 hours to locate the remains of Israeli captives in areas still occupied by the Israeli army.

The resistance movement has so far returned the remains of 15 captives as 13 bodies remain in the besieged territory.

Hamas says it does not know the precise whereabouts of all the bodies, explaining that it lost contact with several of its units holding the captives, who were reportedly killed during Israeli bombardments.

Mohammad al-Hindi, deputy secretary general of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad movement in a recent interview insisted that the Israeli regime was "blackmailing, stalling, and manipulating" the recently agreed ceasefire deal with Palestinian resistance factions in Gaza.

Israel was "manipulating the pretext of bodies to justify renewed aggression" in Gaza, he stated.

The regime itself has been accused of repeatedly breaching the cease-fire conditions, including by carrying out deadly attacks in Gaza and not allowing enough aid into the besieged Palestinian territory.

Israel's violations of the ceasefire agreement in Gaza have claimed at least 93 Palestinian lives.

During Israel's two-year-long genocidal war on the besieged strip, the occupying regime killed at least 68,527 Palestinians and wounded 170,395 others, before a ceasefire agreement was reached in Gaza earlier this month.