The Israeli military on Thursday confirmed the identities of the bodies of two more hostages returned by Hamas, the latest from the Palestinian armed group under a cease-fire agreement.
Late Thursday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office announced that the bodies were those of Sahar Baruch and Amiram Cooper, who were captured in the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack that sparked the conflict.
“The Israeli government shares the deep sorrow of the Cooper and Sahar families and the entire families of the deceased hostages,” the statement said.
According to the Israeli military, the two sets of remains were given to the Red Cross in the Gaza Strip, then transported by troops to Israel, where they were taken to the National Institute of Forensic Medicine for identification.
Baruch was preparing to earn a degree in electrical engineering when he was taken hostage at Kibbutz Beli. His older brother Idan was killed in the attack. Three months after Sahar’s capture, the Israeli military announced that he had been killed during a rescue operation. He was 25 years old.
Cooper was an economist and one of the founders of Kibbutz Nir Oz. He was captured with his wife Nurit and released 17 days later. In June 2024, Israeli authorities confirmed that he had been killed in Gaza. He was 84 years old.
So far, Hamas has returned the remains of 17 hostages since the start of the ceasefire, with 11 others still in Gaza and expected to be handed over under the terms of the agreement.
In return, Israel returned the bodies of 195 Palestinians to Gaza authorities without disclosing details about their identities. It is unclear whether they were killed in Israel during the October 7 attack, died in Israeli custody as detainees, or were retrieved from Gaza by the military during the war.
Health officials in Gaza said they were struggling to identify the bodies because DNA kits were not available.
Gaza authorities say 40 people were injured in the strike
Meanwhile, authorities in southern Gaza announced Thursday that at least 40 people were injured in overnight attacks, after Israel declared a ceasefire had resumed on Wednesday morning.
Mohammad Saar, director of nursing at Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza, said they had received 40 injured people from the overnight attack on Khan Yunis.
The Israeli military said it had attacked “terrorist infrastructure that poses a threat to the military” in Khan Yunis. Areas of southern Gaza are under Israeli military control.
Israel claimed the attack was in retaliation for the shooting death of a soldier in Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city, following an attack earlier this week that killed more than 100 people.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Hamas had broken the terms of the agreement regarding the return of the hostages’ remains.
Hamas denies involvement in the shootout and accuses Israel of violating the ceasefire agreement.
“If Hamas continues its blatant violation of the ceasefire, it will be attacked as powerfully as it was the day before yesterday and yesterday,” Prime Minister Netanyahu said Thursday at a graduation ceremony for Israel’s military commanders in southern Israel.
He vowed that Israel would “act as necessary” to eliminate “immediate danger” to its forces.
“At the end of the day, Hamas will be demilitarized and Gaza will be demilitarized. If foreign forces do this, all the better. If they don’t do it, we will.”
Guarantors of Gaza’s fragile ceasefire agreement have reportedly told Hamas that Israel plans to launch military operations against targets in Israeli-occupied territory in the Palestinian territories and will not protest after the deadline for militants to leave the area expires on Thursday.
The ceasefire, which took effect on October 10, aims to end the war sparked by attacks on Israel by Hamas-led militants in 2023. The attack killed around 1,200 people and sparked an onslaught on the Israeli side that killed more than 65,000 Palestinians. This conflict is the bloodiest and most damaging conflict in history between both sides.