KHAN YOUNIS, Gaza (AP) — Israel returned the bodies of 15 Palestinians to Gaza on Friday, officials at Nasser hospital in Khan Younis said, in the latest step to fulfilling the terms of the fragile U.S.-brokered ceasefire agreement.
The bodies were returned after militants late Thursday handed over the body of one of the last four remaining Israeli hostages taken during the Oct. 7, 2023, attack that launched the war in Gaza.
Israel identified the returned
body as that of Meny Godard, who was abducted from Kibbutz Be’eri in southern Israel. His wife, Ayelet, was killed during the attack.
The armed wings of Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad said Godard’s body was recovered in southern Gaza.
The remains of 25 hostages have been returned to Israel since the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas began on Oct. 10. There are still three more in Gaza that need to be recovered and handed over. Hamas returned 20 living hostages to Israel on Oct. 13.
For each hostage returned, Israel has released the remains of 15 Palestinians, an exchange central to the ceasefire’s first phase. Overall, the number of bodies of Palestinians received so far is 330, of which only 95 have been formally identified, according to Gaza Health Ministry officials.
Health officials in Gaza have said identifying the remains handed over by Israel is complicated by a lack of DNA testing kits.
The bodies of 27 unidentified Palestinians were interred in Gaza on Friday.
As winter settles over Gaza and the first rains begin, displaced families are struggling to keep their makeshift shelters from collapsing under the weather.
As cloudy skies Friday threatened another downpour in Gaza City, Abdel Rahim Halawa, a father of seven children, worked to fasten a tarp over his tent made of wood, blankets and sheets of plastic.
“All of the mattresses and blankets got drenched this evening. If more rain comes on us, we don’t know how we can live anymore,” he said.
Some families have taken shelter in what remains of destroyed buildings. One family lives inside a section of concrete held up by a single crooked column, its open side covered with a piece of tarp.
“Yes, it might collapse. Some committees came and told us it’s forbidden to live inside of it, but we have no alternative, especially in the winter with the severe cold,” said Saed Salhi, who is living in the structure with four members of his family, all displaced from their home in Jabaliya in northern Gaza.
The U.N.'s human rights chief, Volker Türk, on Friday joined a chorus of condemnation over a recent string of attacks by Israeli settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank, urging an end to the violence and for Israel to hold the perpetrators accountable.
U.N. Human Rights Commissioner spokesperson Thameen Al-Kheetan said more than 260 attacks by Israeli settlers against Palestinians and their property in the West Bank were recorded in October, more than in any month since 2006.
“We reiterate that the Israeli government’s assertion of sovereignty over the occupied West Bank and its annexation of parts of it are in breach of international law, as the International Court of Justice has confirmed,” said Al-Kheetan.
Israeli settlers on Thursday torched and defaced a mosque in a Palestinian village in the central West Bank. That followed violence two days earlier during which dozens of masked Israeli settlers set fire to vehicles and other property in the Palestinian villages of Beit Lid and Deir Sharaf.
The attacks on the two Palestinian villages prompted Israeli President Isaac Herzog to denounce them as “shocking and serious.” The Israeli army’s chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir, said the military “will not tolerate the phenomena of a minority of criminals who tarnish a law-abiding public.”
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Wednesday that there's concern that the events in the West Bank "could undermine what we’re doing in Gaza.”
Israeli officials have sought to cast settler violence as the work of a few extremists. But Palestinians and rights groups say that the violence is widespread and carried out by settlers across the territory, with impunity from Israel’s far-right government. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hasn’t commented on the surge in violence.
The Palestinian Health Ministry in the West Bank said six teenagers — aged 15 to 17 — were shot and killed by Israeli fire in four separate incidents over the last two weeks. In the most recent incident Thursday, two 15-year-old boys were killed near the village of Beit Ummar.
The Israeli military said that in three of the incidents its soldiers were responding to “terrorists” hurling either Molotov cocktails or explosives or carrying out a “terror attack.” In the other, the military said troops acted according to “standard operating procedures” and opened fire against Palestinians throwing rocks to “remove the threat.”
The next parts of the 20-point ceasefire plan call for creating an international stabilization force, forming a technocratic Palestinian government and disarming Hamas.
The fragile agreement aims to wind down the war that was triggered by the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel that killed about 1,200 people and saw 251 taken hostage.
Israel responded with a sweeping military offensive that has killed more than 69,100 Palestinians in Gaza, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. The ministry, part of the Hamas-run government and staffed by medical professionals, maintains detailed records viewed as generally reliable by independent experts.
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This story has been updated to correct that there were more than 260 attacks by settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank in October, not 206.
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