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Hamas requests equipment to recover dead as Israel disputes identity of returned bodies

Iran Press TV

Saturday, 01 November 2025 2:00 PM

Hamas has called for international mediators and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to provide additional equipment and personnel to accelerate efforts to recover the bodies of Israeli captives killed in Gaza.

The military wing of the Hamas resistance movement, the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, said in a statement on Saturday that it had offered to deliver samples from unidentified remains for testing, but Israel refused and insisted that full bodies be returned for examination.

As a result, Hamas handed over the bodies of three individuals to the Red Cross, which transferred them to the occupied territories on Friday.

The Israeli military said forensic tests showed that the three bodies did not belong to any of the captives still unaccounted for under the US-brokered ceasefire agreement. Israel said 11 deceased captives remain to be returned.

Under the ceasefire deal that took effect on October 10, Hamas has so far returned all 20 living captives and 17 bodies, including 15 Israelis, one Thai national, and one Nepali national.

Hamas has repeatedly said that its recovery efforts are hampered by the vast destruction across the Gaza Strip, where many remains lie buried under rubble, and a lack of heavy machinery to search through the rubble.

Israel, however, has accused Hamas of delaying the process, claiming the group is violating the terms of the agreement and launching attacks across Gaza.

The resistance group urged mediators and the ICRC to "provide and equip the necessary equipment and personnel to work on retrieving all the bodies simultaneously," saying that its teams are prepared to recover remains "inside the Green Line."

The Green Line is commonly referred to as the 1949 Armistice Line, the internationally recognized boundary between Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories.

Dozens of Israeli captives are believed to have been killed by the regime's airstrikes and gunfire during its two-year genocidal war on the Palestinian territory.