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This announcement was made on Monday Hamas The release of another hostage’s body brought hope to 13 families and the Israeli public anxiously awaiting the return of the remains of their loved ones. Gaza,
Then came news that the militant group had returned only the partial remains of a hostage that had been recovered by Israeli troops nearly two years earlier. This brought fresh grief to the families of those hostages, whose bodies are still lying somewhere in the ruins palestinian area.
More than two weeks after a ceasefire began in the Israel-Hamas war, families looking to comfort their relatives are facing a terrifying waiting game. The slow return of remains is the most immediate threat to the cease-fire that began on October 10, and is a sensitive issue for the Israeli public, who attach religious and cultural importance to repatriating bodies for burial in Israel.
Orna Neutra, the mother of an Israeli-American soldier who was killed in a Hamas-led attack on October 7, 2023, and whose body was taken by Hamas, said her family is eager to bring her son Omar home.
“This is my son,” she said Monday Tel Aviv“We need that solidity. We visited some of the families who got their loved ones back, and they shared with us about some of the intimacy of receiving the body, actually seeing it, and how that felt for them. And I can say as Omar’s mother that I really needed that.”
The US-brokered ceasefire was under new pressure on Tuesday, when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he had ordered the military to launch new “powerful strikes” in Gaza, and Hamas responded by saying it would delay what it claimed would be the handing over of another hostage body.
As part of the ceasefire, Hamas released 20 surviving hostages earlier this month in exchange for approximately 2,000 Palestinian prisoners and detainees. The militants also released the remains of 15 hostages.
Hamas says it has not been able to access all the remains because they are buried under debris from Israel’s two-year offensive on Gaza. Israel has accused the militants of withdrawing and threatened to resume military operations or withhold humanitarian aid if all remains are not returned.
This week, Hamas said it had expanded the search for the bodies of hostages to new areas of Gaza. Egypt has also deployed a team of experts and heavy equipment to help recover the bodies.
Meanwhile in Gaza, Palestinian families are also struggling to identify bodies that Israel returned under the ceasefire. Thousands of Palestinians are still missing from Gaza, possibly buried under debris or in Israeli hands.
The family believed that the son was alive for 14 months.
Omar Neutra, 21, was born and raised in Long Island, New York, and moved to Israel to join the army as a volunteer. He was serving as an officer at the Gaza border and was kidnapped along with the rest of his tank crew. He and two other people were killed. One soldier survived and was released after two years of captivity.
Neutra’s parents made 40 trips to Washington to lobby for their son, made regular appearances at protests in the US and Israel and addressed the Republican National Convention last year. For more than a year after the October 7 attack, they continued to believe that Omar was still alive. After 14 months, they received news from the army that intelligence indicated that Omar had been killed during the 2023 attack.
Omar’s mother said, “It is not based on any forensic evidence. It is based on some intelligence and it is very difficult to solve.”
Watching the return of the 20 surviving hostages reminded Omar’s father, Ronen Neutra, of the Israeli proverb “cry with one eye and smile with the other.” Ronan said, on the one hand, it was “miraculous” that all the surviving hostages were released in a single day. But the family also knew that there would be no joyous reunion for them.
Orna Neutra didn’t expect that waiting for her son’s body would be the hardest. The painful pace at which bodies are being returned is a new kind of torture, he said.
“You crave this closure,” she said. “But we know it will also cause grief that lingers over two years of fighting.”
Return of dead bodies is necessary for mourning
For hostage families who have received the remains of their loved ones, Dr. Einat Yehen, head of rehabilitation for the Hostage Families Forum, urges them to spend time with the body, even to the point of touching it.
“Some came back recently with clothes on. Some were just bones. Some were just parts of the remains, dismembered pieces. It’s very devastating,” Yehen said.
The return of the bodies is necessary to attempt to provide some form of relief to “interrupted mourning”, a unique type of loss where families are left grief-stricken and surrounded by questions.
“Parents are burying someone they haven’t seen for two years,” Yehen said. Being close to bodies provides a “sense of brevity,” he said, and physical proximity provides a chance to say goodbye.
Palestinian families in Gaza are going through a similar ordeal as they try to identify the remains of bodies that Israel has returned.
Under the ceasefire agreement, Israel agreed to return 15 dead Palestinians in exchange for the body of each dead hostage, but Israel does not provide any identification of bodies and does not allow DNA-testing material into Gaza.
Gaza Health Ministry officials said many of the bodies appeared to be fighters or others killed during the Hamas-led offensive on October 7, 2023, and in the days following. Israel has released the bodies of 195 Palestinians, but only 75 have been identified, according to the ministry, which is part of the government-run group Hamas.
Judaism and Islam call for immediate burial
In Judaism and Islam, burial is expected immediately after death. Among Jews, this practice is traced to a line in Deuteronomy, which instructs followers not to leave a body outside overnight but to bury it the same day.
Israel is still fighting for the remains of Eli Cohen, a spy killed in Syria in 1965, and Ron Arad, an Israeli aviator missing after his plane was shot down over Lebanon in 1986. Both are household names in Israel. One of the 13 families waiting is that of Hadar Goldin, who was killed during the 2014 war between Israel and Hamas. His family has held weekly protests for the last 11 years to return his body.
“The idea of honoring the dead is intrinsic to the Jewish life cycle,” explained Sharon Laufer, who has been volunteering as part of Jewish burial societies, or Havre Kadisha, for decades, and is a reserve soldier in a special unit that identifies the bodies of fallen soldiers and prepares them for burial.
He said, “We demand burial because the soul leaves the body and continues to hover nearby, so the integrity of the person remains present until burial.” “The soul is not complete until the body is buried in the earth.”
Ronen Neutra knows that many outside Israel have moved on. He has found himself repeating sentences like “a dead hostage is still a hostage”.
“It is part of our culture that we leave no one behind,” he said, referring to the close-knit Israeli society, where military service is mandatory. “You don’t leave survivors behind, and we don’t leave survivors behind. We bring them all back, and we honor them.”