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Israel Accuses Hamas of Playing a Macabre Game With Hostage Bodies
Israeli officials say the militant group is deliberately delaying the return of hostages’ bodies to gain time to consolidate power
Israel and the Red Cross accused Hamas of staging the recovery of a hostage’s body this week, the latest in a string of incidents straining a cease-fire that the Trump administration is trying to hold together.
Israel on Tuesday released what it said was drone footage showing Hamas tossing a body wrapped in white out of a window, burying it, and then using an excavator to unearth it in front of Red Cross representatives.
Israel said the remains belonged to Ofir Tzarfati, a 27-year-old hostage who died shortly after being wounded in the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, according to his family. His body was partially recovered two years ago by Israel’s military.
Israel accused Hamas of a macabre manipulation that violated the terms of the cease-fire. The Red Cross criticized the U.S.-designated terrorist group for involving it in an apparent ruse.
“It is unacceptable that a fake recovery was staged, when so much depends on this agreement being upheld and when so many families are still anxiously awaiting news of their loved ones,” the humanitarian agency said.
Hamas said it is abiding by the terms of the cease-fire deal and that Israel’s claims were an attempt to create a pretext to restart the war. Israel said it launched strikes against dozens of Hamas assets and targeted 30 militants Tuesday after one of its soldiers was killed in Gaza. Health authorities in Gaza said more than 100 people were killed, including children.
Israel said it returned to the cease-fire on Wednesday but later said it had struck Hamas targets in northern Gaza.
Israeli officials believe Hamas is deliberately delaying the return of hostages’ bodies to gain time to consolidate power and reassert control over the battered enclave. Since the declaration of the cease-fire more than two weeks ago, Hamas has cracked down on its opponents within the Gaza Strip, including carrying out public executions of members of a rival clan.
“Hamas’s strategy is to drag this out as long as possible without breaking the cease-fire and entering into direct clashes with [President] Trump and the U.S. and the mediating countries,” said Tamir Hayman, a former head of Israeli military intelligence who is close to Israel’s military establishment. “The method of buying time is trickling these bodies back under the excuse they are searching for them.”
The debate over the hostages’ bodies adds an emotional point of pressure to a cease-fire already strained by a rash of skirmishes along the dividing line that separates Israeli forces from the rest of Gaza.
The strong support among the Israeli public for ending the war was rooted in the urgency of recovering all the hostages, dead and alive. Hostage families and right-wing lawmakers are now leaning on the government to punish Hamas.
“These actions are not mistakes or misunderstandings,” the Hostages Families Forum said Tuesday. “They are deliberate acts of cruelty designed to deepen the families’ suffering and prolong Hamas’s control.”
Hamas has pushed back against the criticism, saying it is searching for the bodies in good faith. The group has told Arab mediators that in many cases the people holding the hostages have died. Israeli intelligence believes Hamas has lost the location of a handful of bodies, according to people familiar with the matter. There is a risk that some might never be found.
Trump’s cease-fire agreement anticipated that recovering the bodies would be a complex task given the extent of the destruction in Gaza. It gave Hamas 72 hours to turn over any bodies in its possession but didn’t set a deadline for the rest, requiring only that Hamas cooperate in the process.
Hamas sparked anger in Israel when it handed over only four bodies on the first day of the exchange in early October. The group has since returned a total of 15 bodies out of the 28 that were still in Gaza, a sluggish pace that has drawn criticism from the Israeli public and hostage families.
Israel believes Hamas knows the location of around eight more bodies, according to Arab mediators and a person familiar with the matter.
The remains of one of the bodies returned by Hamas this month turned out not to belong to a hostage, but to a Palestinian from the West Bank accused of collaborating with Israel, the Arab mediators said.
Hamas released all 20 of the living hostages it held on the first day of the early October exchange. Militants led by Hamas had taken 251 hostages from Israel during the Oct. 7 attacks that also left around 1,200 people dead.
An Egyptian search team has been in Gaza in recent days searching for bodies, sometimes accompanied by Hamas members. It faces challenges including unexploded Israeli ordnance and a lack of equipment such as excavators, bulldozers and heavy trucks, according to the Arab mediators.
The Egyptian search team also suspects Hamas members are reluctant to reveal tunnel entrances and other infrastructure, Arab mediators said.
Israel has so far allowed only Egypt to send a team to take part in the search, even though Egypt has repeatedly asked for help, including from Turkey, which gained valuable experience during the country’s devastating 2023 earthquake, the Arab mediators said.
Earlier this month, U.S. Vice President JD Vance urged patience with the recovery effort.
“This is not going to happen overnight,” the vice president said. “Some of these hostages are buried under thousands of pounds of rubble. Some of the hostages nobody even knows where they are.”
Write to Anat Peled at anat.peled@wsj.com and Summer Said at summer.said@wsj.com
