Israel’s military has confirmed that the latest remains handed over to the Red Cross in Gaza and returned to Israel are those of a dead hostage.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said the returned hostage is Eliyahu Margalit, 75, who was killed on 7 October and his body taken into Gaza from Nir Oz kibbutz.
His death was announced by Israel in December 2023, a month after his daughter Nili – who was also taken hostage – was released during a temporary truce.
Mr Margalit, who was known to his family and friends as Churchill, is the 10th dead hostage to be returned from Gaza. The remains of another 18 people have yet to be repatriated.
In a statement, the Hostages and Missing Families Forum described Mr Margalit as “a cowboy at heart” who managed a cattle branch and horse stables at Nir Oz for many years.
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said in a statement on Friday night that its team had taken “all possible measures to ensure the deceased are managed with respect”, and that Israeli forensic authorities would identify the remains in Tel Aviv.
There has been fury in Israel that Hamas has not returned all of the bodies, in line with last week’s ceasefire deal – though the US has downplayed the suggestion it amounts to a breach.
On Friday night, the IDF again stressed that Hamas must “uphold the agreement and take the necessary steps to return all the hostages”.
Hamas has said it remains committed to the ceasefire, including “keenness to hand over all remaining corpses”.
It has blamed Israel for making the task difficult because Israeli strikes have reduced so many buildings to rubble and it does not allow heavy machinery and diggers into Gaza to be able to search for the hostages’ bodies.
As part of the US-brokered ceasefire deal, Israel freed 250 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails and 1,718 detainees from Gaza.
After Hamas said it was unable to retrieve all the bodies, two senior Trump advisers said preparations to move to the next phase of the ceasefire deal were continuing.
The advisers told reporters that the US government did not so far believe that Hamas had broken the agreement by not retrieving more remains, and said the group had acted in good faith by sharing information with interlocutors.
While the full text of the agreement between Israel and Hamas has not been made public, a leaked version which appeared in Israeli media appeared to allow for the possibility that not all of the bodies would be immediately accessible.
Speaking about their role in brokering the ceasefire, US special envoy Steve Witkoff told CBS News’s 60 Minutes programme that President Donald Trump had felt “like the Israelis were getting a little bit out of control in what they were doing” after it targeted Hamas leaders in an air strike in Qatar in September.
Following the strike in Doha, in which five lower-level Hamas members and a Qatari officer were killed, Witkoff said Trump had felt “it was time to be very strong and stop them [Israel] from doing things that he felt were not in their long-term interests”.
Witkoff, who led the US team at the talks alongside Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, said they had felt “a little bit betrayed” by the Israeli move.
“We had lost the confidence of the Qataris. And so Hamas went underground, and it was very, very difficult to get to them,” Witkoff told the US network.
Qatar, a key US ally, has played an important mediating role in ceasefire negotiations between Hamas and Israel.
The Israeli military launched a campaign in Gaza in response to the 7 October 2023 attack, in which Hamas-led gunmen killed about 1,200 people in southern Israel and took 251 others hostage.
At least 67,967 people have been killed by Israeli attacks in Gaza since then, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry, whose figures are seen by the UN as reliable.
