With a countdown to the release of 20 living hostages held in Gaza under way, Israel is preparing for a far more macabre task: recovering the remains of its dead from the Palestinian territory.
It is a mission that has consumed Israel since Hamas’s cross-border October 7 2023 attack, when the militant group took 250 captives back to Gaza.
Early on in the Gaza war, when Israeli soldiers started exploring the subterranean world of Hamas’s tunnels in the strip, a small commando unit was given the grim task of collecting samples from bodies they encountered in the darkness, in case later DNA analysis revealed them to be dead hostages.
Then, as the Israeli military took control of larger parts of the besieged enclave, its bulldozers dug up Palestinian cemeteries — human rights groups documented at least four such excavations — and hauled away hundreds of bodies in case hostages were among them.
Recovering the bodies of their fallen comrades — at whatever cost — has long been a totem of Israel’s security doctrine. But it also been seen as a societal vow to the Israeli parents who send their children into combat.
To this day, Israel’s military seeks the remains in Syria of Eli Cohen, a Mossad spy discovered and hung in Damascus in 1965. Israeli commandos brought back his watch in 2018, and in 2025, the new Syrian authorities quietly made it known that they had agreed to the return of an archive of his possessions to cool tensions.
But in the bitter history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the fate of the dead has been a perennial source of tension — and pain — as each side collects bodies of their enemies and extracts a price.
Hamas is responsible for handing over the bodies of at least 28 hostages alongside the living under Donald Trump’s 20-point peace plan for Gaza. Israel is also to release the remains of 15 deceased Gazans for every one of them — a macabre calculus that mirrors the asymmetry of the war’s casualties.
“The hostages that are deceased will be brought to a proper Jewish burial,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Friday. “We will act to locate all of them as soon as possible — we will do that as a sacred duty of communal responsibility.”
Though, according to the letter of the US president’s deal, Hamas has until Monday to return the hostages, two Israeli officials said there was an understanding that not all the dead may be recovered by then.
An addendum to the agreement, which is designed to eventually end the war, also calls for the establishment of a special task force for deceased hostages led by Gal Hirsch, an Israeli brigadier.
According to one official in Israel, the task force will consist of Israeli, US, Egyptian, Turkish and Qatari representatives who will be responsible for locating the remaining bodies Hamas cannot — or will not — find.
Israel has found and retrieved the bodies of at least 50 hostages so far during the war. In August 2024, the military found the bodies of six dead hostages hidden inside a false wall during a two-day raid in Khan Younis. Another eight were released in ceasefires.
At the same time, Israel holds as many as 2,000, and perhaps even more, Palestinian bodies, according to media reports and a non-governmental organisation called the National Campaign for the Recovery of Martyr’s Bodies.
That includes at least 726 from the occupied West Bank — most preceding the current war — buried in so-called cemeteries of numbers, where graves are identifiable only in a file kept by the military so families do not know which one to pray at.
Several Israeli newspapers reported Israel was also holding at least 1,500 bodies from Gaza, frozen in morgues around the country — most of them in an imposing concrete building in Tel Aviv called the Abu Kabir Forensic Institute.
The accumulation of remains is a trauma both enemies inflict on the other, and a source of debate among devout Palestinians and in Supreme Court cases brought by liberal Israelis.
Yet the gruesome haggling has continued. For instance, Israel and Hamas negotiated for nearly a decade over the bodies of two Israeli soldiers from the 2014 war in Gaza, with Netanyahu at times displaying pictures of the pair on his desk.
The body of one, Oron Shaul, was found during the furtive excavations during this war and returned to his grateful mother.
“We were promised that our son would be located,” said Leah Goldin, mother of the second soldier, Hadar, whose remains are still to be recovered. “Send Israeli operational rescue missions to locate the missing — don’t release even one Hamas [member] until then.”
The work of those searches has fallen to two Israeli military units. One, Yashar, works in the heat of combat to retrieve the bodies of soldiers.
The other, Eitan, has trained the algorithms that sift through the terabytes of data collected by Israeli drones to find evidence of recent graves.
In theory, said one reservist who served in the unit, drones capture high enough resolution data to discern the shape of a new mound, and even the sort of vegetation that grows over a fresh, unmarked grave.
But he said the strategy has proved futile in this conflict. “In Gaza, there were graves everywhere, bodies everywhere,” he added.
In Israel, the families of those confirmed dead seek resolution that only a burial can provide, said Hagai Levine, who heads the health team for a group that supports the families.
“For them, the nightmare continues and will not end until they will know for sure what happened to their beloved, and will be able to confirm and to bring them back for burial,” he added.
“Some of them understand that they are probably dead, but they still have a hope. They really need this closure.”
Additional reporting by Neri Zilber