IDF troops in the Gaza Strip have received two caskets, with the apparent bodies of dead hostages, from the Red Cross a short while ago.
The caskets had been collected by the Red Cross from Hamas in Gaza City.
The IDF is set to inspect the caskets before draping them in Israeli flags and holding a short ceremony led by a military rabbi.
The remains will then be taken to the Abu Kabir forensic institute in Tel Aviv for identification to confirm they belong to slain hostages.
Israeli intelligence shared with the US claimed that Hamas had access to more bodies than claimed by the Palestinian terror group, Axios reports.
Citing two Israeli officials and one US official, the news outlet reports that Israel has told the US that Hamas is not doing enough to recover the bodies of the dead hostages, and that the Gaza deal cannot move into the next phase until that changes.
“We don’t see Hamas making maximum effort regarding the bodies,” it quotes an Israeli official as saying.
The US official tells Axios that Washington believes Hamas will eventually return all the bodies, “but it is going to take time.”
“We will continue working on it but we can’t allow the deal to collapse,” the official stresses.
US President Donald Trump says Hamas is looking for the bodies of the remaining deceased hostages held in Gaza.
“It’s a gruesome process… They’re digging and they’re finding a lot of bodies. Then they have to separate the bodies,” Trump tells reporters in the Oval Office..
“Some of those bodies have been in there a long time, and some of them are under rubble. They have to remove rubble,” he continues. “Some are in tunnels… that are way down under the earth.”
Predicting that the next question will be about whether Hamas will disarm, Trump reiterates, “We want the weapons to be given… They’ve agreed to do it. Now they have to do it. If they don’t do it, we’ll do it.”
He clarifies that the US military won’t be directly involved if intervention against Hamas is needed.
Trump claims Arab countries wouldn’t have agreed to get behind his plan for ending the war in Gaza had the US not struck Iran’s nuclear sites.
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