Media Report 2025.10.19
Israel identifies remains of 10th hostage handed over by Hamas as 76-year-old Eliyahu Margalit
ABC / AP | 18 October 2025
- Israel has identified the remains of the 10th hostage handed over by Hamas as 76-year-old Eliyahu Margalit.
- Hamas has said it is committed to handing over all of the hostages’ bodies, as agreed under the ceasefire deal, but 18 are yet to be returned.
- US President Donald Trump has said that if Hamas does not return all 28 hostages’ bodies, he will green-light Israel to resume the war.
Israel says the remains of the 10th hostage handed over by Hamas have been identified as 76-year-old Eliyahu Margalit.
Mr Margalit was abducted by Hamas on October 7, 2023, from the horse stables where he worked in Kibbutz Nir Oz.
Israel’s Prime Minister’s Office said on Saturday that Mr Margalit’s body was identified after testing by the National Center for Forensic Medicine, and his family had been notified.
Hamas handed over an 11th body this week, but it was not that of a hostage.
In a statement on Saturday, the hostage forum, which supports the families of those abducted, said Mr Margalit’s return brings a measure of solace to his family, but that they would not rest until the remaining 18 hostages came home.
The forum said it would continue holding weekly rallies until all remains were returned.
Hamas pressured to find hostages’ bodies
The effort to find the remains followed a warning from US President Donald Trump that he would green-light Israel to resume the war if Hamas did not live up to its end of the deal and return all 28 hostages’ bodies.
The handover of hostages’ remains, called for under the ceasefire agreement, has been among the key sticking points — along with aid deliveries, the opening of border crossings into Gaza, and hopes for reconstruction — in a process backed by much of the international community to help end two years of devastating war in Gaza.
Hamas has said it is committed to the terms of the ceasefire deal, including the handover of bodies.
However, the retrieval of bodies is hampered by the scope of the devastation and the presence of dangerous, unexploded ordnance.
The group has also told mediators that some bodies are in areas controlled by Israeli troops.
Mr Margalit’s body was found after two bulldozers ploughed up pits in the earth in the city of Khan Younis.
Hamas urges more aid flows
Hamas has also urged mediators to increase the flow of aid into Gaza, expedite the opening of the Rafah border crossing with Egypt, and start reconstruction of the battered territory.
The flow of aid remains constrained because of continued closures of crossings and restrictions on aid groups.
United Nations data on Friday showed 339 trucks had been offloaded for distribution in Gaza since the ceasefire began.
Under the agreement, some 600 humanitarian aid trucks would be allowed to enter each day.
COGAT, the Israeli defence body overseeing aid in Gaza, reported 950 trucks crossed on Thursday and 716 on Wednesday, the UN said.
Israel restricted aid to Gaza throughout the war
Gaza’s more than 2 million people are hoping the ceasefire will bring relief from the humanitarian disaster caused by Israel’s offensive.
Throughout the war, Israel restricted aid entry to Gaza, sometimes halting it altogether.
Famine was declared in Gaza City, and the UN said it had verified that more than 400 people who died of malnutrition-related causes, including more than 100 children.
Israel’s campaign in Gaza has killed nearly 68,000 Palestinians, according to the Health Ministry that is part of the Hamas-run government in the territory.
Its figures are seen as a reliable estimate of wartime deaths by UN agencies and many independent experts.
Israel has disputed them without providing its own toll.
Thousands more people are missing, according to the Red Cross.
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A history of the Israeli settler movement in the Occupied Palestinian Territory
ABC | Annabelle Quince & Nick Baker (for Rear Vision) | 18 October 2025
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-10-18/israeli-settlers-rear-vision/105789284
Since the October 7 attacks on Israel, much of the world’s attention has been focused on the war in Gaza.
But another kind of conflict has also been flaring nearby.
For more than 50 years, Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory have grown in both size and number, especially in the West Bank.
Many Palestinians there now live alongside Israeli settlements and the relationship between these two groups is fraught.
According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, instances of settler violence — violence perpetrated by Israeli settlers against Palestinians in the occupied territory — have been on the rise.
And even if the war in Gaza comes to an end, these settlements are a key stumbling block to any future peace deal.
‘A massive expansion of Israeli territory’
Like many stories in the Middle East, this one begins with a war.
In 1967, Israel launched a pre-emptive strike which started a conflict with its larger Arab neighbours, Egypt, Jordan and Syria.
In what became known as the Six-Day War, Israel quickly defeated this coalition and managed to seize new territories from them, including the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip.
These areas fell under Israeli control and form today’s Occupied Palestinian Territory.
“It was a massive victory and a massive expansion of Israeli territory,” Callie Maidhof, a professor of global studies at the University of Chicago, tells ABC Radio National’s Rear Vision.
Israel annexed East Jerusalem as it was home to key Jewish religious sites. But it refused to give Palestinians in the city citizenship, giving them only Israeli residency and leaving them stateless.
It was much more reluctant to incorporate the West Bank and Gaza into the state of Israel due to their much larger Palestinian populations.
This meant Palestinians in those areas didn’t become Israeli residents or citizens, instead finding themselves stateless and subject to Israeli military law in most areas.
“The political leaders … had no clear agenda of what to do with these new territories that Israel just conquered,” says Arie Perliger, a professor at the School of Criminology at the University of Massachusetts.
Embracing settlements
In the late 1960s, Israeli settlers, many of whom were deeply religious and nationalistic, began to move into the newly-occupied areas, particularly the West Bank.
Settlers bought land from the Palestinians or they occupied land previously controlled by the Arab states who were defeated in the 1967 war.
There were also cases where “the owners [of land] didn’t have the capability to challenge the settlers”, Professor Perliger says.
The Israeli government, however, was lukewarm to the settlement idea and multiple settlements were evacuated.
“The most dominant policy was that [the occupied] areas would not become part of the state of Israel, that it was not a realistic vision,” Professor Perliger says.
But that all changed in 1977.
That year, a shock election saw the right-wing Likud party come to power, ending decades of rule by the left.
Likud was “highly supportive of the idea that the [occupied territory is] part of the historical land of Israel” and “should never be given back to anyone else”, Professor Perliger says.
He says Likud also thought these areas were of “strategic military and operational importance” and could act as a buffer zone against aggressive neighbours.
On this basis, the Israeli government began to provide financial, operational, military and legal support to grow and maintain the settlements.
A ‘hero’ for the settlers
That same 1977 election boosted the profile of Ariel Sharon, who would go on to serve as Israel’s prime minister from 2001 to 2006.
Sharon was appointed agriculture minister and used his position to become a champion of the settler movement.
“He planned to move 1 million Israelis to the occupied territories [within] 10 years,” explains Akiva Eldar, a journalist and co-author of Lords of the Land: The War Over Israel’s Settlements in the Occupied Territories.
“He offered cheap housing … [with] all kinds of subsidies from the government.”
But in 1979, a landmark court case in Israel prohibited Israelis from seizing private land for settlement purposes in the occupied territory.
“Almost immediately, Ariel Sharon was like, ‘OK, how do we get around this?'” Professor Maidhof says.
“[He] started using this old Ottoman land law that said if land had not been cultivated for a certain amount of time, and if it was a certain distance from a village, then it was declared ‘dead land’.”
Ever since, the growth of settlements has continued unabated, regardless of which political parties governed Israel.
“People just kept moving there,” Professor Maidhof says.
“Today you have around 800,000 Jewish-Israeli settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.”
The intifadas
In 1987, Palestinians began to rise up across Israel and the occupied territory, in what came to be known as the first intifada.
The following six years were marred by tension and violence, which transformed relations between Palestinians and Israelis.
Against this backdrop, the 1992 Israeli election was won by the Labor party and its leader Yitzhak Rabin, who embraced dialogue with the Palestinians.
But Rabin and his politics worried many in the Israeli settler movement.
“After almost 25 years of dramatic success, [some Israeli settlers] were extremely frustrated by what they saw as Rabin’s willingness to make substantial concessions in the West Bank,” Professor Perliger says.
“They used every tactic to portray the left and Rabin as an enemy of the Jewish people.”
At the time, Yasser Arafat was the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, the political group which represents Palestinian people to the region and the world.
In 1993, Rabin and Arafat signed the Oslo Accords. The historic agreement was intended to help bring peace to the region and, in doing so, reshaped the West Bank.
“The Oslo Accords divided the West Bank into areas A, B and C. It effectively said where Israelis can go, where Palestinians can go, and who has control in those places,” Professor Maidhof explains.
But she says for some Israeli settlers, this marked “an existential threat”.
In 1995, Rabin was assassinated by an Israeli right-wing extremist who opposed the Oslo Accords.
And in the years that followed, negotiations stalled and tensions rose.
In 2000, a renewed uprising, known as the second intifada, saw mass demonstrations, unprecedented violence and a spate of suicide bombings around Israel.
“The Israeli government felt that the only way to actually block those waves of suicide bombers [was] having much more control over Palestinian movement [in the occupied territory],” Professor Perliger says.
In response, Israel established security checkpoints and other controls across the West Bank.
But while settlements grew in the West Bank, Israel took a very different approach to the smaller number of settlements which had been built in Gaza over the decades.
In 2005, then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon surprised the world when he ordered the dismantling of all Israeli settlements there.
But shortly after, Sharon fell into a coma and later died, leaving his overall plans unclear.
Professor Maidhof believes “it wasn’t a grand altruistic gesture. It was a way of … pulling out of this small number of settlements [in Gaza] to maintain and expand the broader settlement project [in the West Bank]”.
A rise in violence
Israeli settlements have been found to be illegal under international law by the International Court of Justice.
And legal or not, they are on land that could one day be part of an independent Palestinian state under a two-state solution. And Australia has now joined many other nations in recognising Palestinian statehood.
In 2022, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of the right-wing Likud party formed a coalition government, which included parties and individuals with close links to the settler movement.
His government has asserted that “the Jewish people have an exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of the land of Israel” including the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
And since the October 7 attacks and the war in Gaza, settler violence has been on the rise.
“Every settlement has its own emergency squad that is armed … They’re supposed to defend the settlements in the case of a terrorist attack,” Professor Perliger says.
“[But] the Israeli military [is] stretched thin. So what has happened was that [it has] almost completely relied on local [settler] military units in the West Bank.”
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said it had documented 759 settler attacks in the first half of this year.
Recent settler attacks have included torching Palestinian properties, violence and killing.
“There’s plenty of evidence that many of the attacks on Palestinians by settlers receive almost zero reaction. Palestinians receive almost zero protection from the Israeli military,” Professor Perliger says.
But Prime Minister Netanyahu has defended settlers as broadly a “model” community and there have been some rare instances where his government has denounced settler violence.
Sara Yael Hirschhorn, a historian at the University of Haifa, says that today “something like 5 per cent of settlers are probably involved in settler terrorism”.
“It’s a small percentage of people but it’s a percentage of people that has explicit support from the Israeli [government] coalition”.
She adds that “less than 2 per cent of settler terrorist cases are prosecuted and those are only amongst ones that are actually opened”.
Dr Hirschhorn says there’s been “a cycle of violence that’s been happening in the West Bank” since October 7 and it shows no sign of stopping anytime soon.
“Certainly October 7 is in the background of all of this — both for Palestinians and for Israelis.”
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Gaza war is now over – so why are they still coming?
Daily Telegraph (Herald-Sun, Courier-Mail)| Peta Credlin | 19 October 2025
So, here’s a question that almost all of us are asking – and one that the Albanese government still refuses to answer. Why is Australia still taking in people from Gaza now that the war is over? And if Gazans everywhere else are returning home, why aren’t the thousands already here on their way, too?
On the latest available figures, Australia has granted just under 3500 visas to people from Gaza. But in a sign of just how secretive the government has been, these figures haven’t been updated since last December.
According to Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke, there’s a further 600 to 700 people from Gaza now in the process of trying to come here, despite the fact that Israel is observing a ceasefire. And, further, under US President Donald Trump’s plan – endorsed by Egypt, Jordan, Turkey and the Gulf states – Hamas is to disarm and play no part in Gaza’s future governance.
It was never a good idea to take people from what was, until recently, a terrorist-controlled war zone. No Muslim neighbours would take them and yet Australia, on the other side of the world, has – even though we have no officials on the ground in Gaza to check applicants.
There’s no doubt that Gaza will need substantial rebuilding, but surely people who have argued for a Palestinian state want to return to do that work. And given things should start to get better, what’s the ongoing humanitarian argument for taking in more Gazans?
In fact, the case for taking Gazans fleeing the conflict has always been political, given that Egypt and Jordan have taken none, while other Western countries advocating for Palestine – such as France, the UK and Germany – have only accepted 260, 168, and 147, respectively.
The main reason Australia is taking in relatively large numbers of Gazans would seem to have far more to do with votes in the Home Affairs Minister’s seat than genuine humanitarian concern.
Almost 25 per cent of Watson residents are Muslim – that’s about 20 times the national average. In the nearby seat of Blaxland, held by Education Minister Jason Clare, 32 per cent of the local population is Muslim. And how many overseas arrivals are greeted by a senior minister, as Burke did with a recent group from Gaza?
Organisations such as The Muslim Vote have been stirring up Australian Muslims ever since the October 7, 2023, atrocity. Sadly, Burke seems to believe its propaganda, otherwise why would he be so keen to let Gazans in, while at the same time being secretive about the whole operation, just as he and the Prime Minister were recently with the return of the “ISIS brides” – a term deliberately designed to make them seem merely naive young women.
Not once has Burke, or any other minister, made any formal announcement about the entry of people from Gaza. At no time has there been a government media conference to explain this decision and reassure the community of appropriate safety measures, particularly given the significant rise in anti-Semitism in Australia.
Indeed, we only know about the latest pending arrivals because of a question asked of Burke during a speech at the National Press Club.
Earlier, he had tried to tell the ABC that security checks had been “very thorough” – even though some 2600 individuals to whom visas had been issued were reportedly referred to ASIO in a single day! In fact, it seems that all our officials can do is crosscheck the names on the visa applications against names on terrorist watch lists.
But that only picks up those convicted of terrorism offences – not those with hateful views who will only add to division in Australia.
Recent polls out of Gaza show that more than 50 per cent of the population support Hamas and consider that the October 7 atrocity was justified.
Worse still, given the Albanese government’s hostility to Israel, it’s highly unlikely that Burke would have sought clearances with their security agencies despite the fact that Israel has the best intelligence on who is a Hamas activist and who is just a passive supporter.
This is a government that is consistently misleading on immigration. It claims that it is reducing immigration, yet the latest ABS figures show that net permanent arrivals in the seven months to July were almost 350,000 – an all-time record.
But when it comes to the entry of people who might reasonably be suspected of not sharing our values, the government becomes deceitful.
This is the worst sort of social engineering – bringing people into Australia who are highly unlikely to leave behind the hatreds of their homelands.
The government knows that it’s wildly at odds with what the public expect of their leaders – as this total lack of transparency shows. Not only should we not be taking in any more Gazans, the ones already here should be on a plane heading back.
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Sending our troops major act of hypocrisy
Daily Telegraph | Letters | 19 October 2025
Sending our troops major act of hypocrisy
If Anthony Albanese sends any of our military to serve as a peacekeeping force in Gaza it will be one of his greatest acts of hypocrisy.
This is our Prime Minister. Not once has he been to the Middle East since the war started, his government has been very pro-Palestine throughout the conflict to the extent it has damaged Australia’s long standing alliance with Israel, he even refused a US request to send a single frigate to the Red Sea to help prevent attacks on cargo ships.
It’s a conflict that Australia is not involved in so why involve our military?
It’s also worth remembering that the PM did not commit any of our military to monitor the Chinese warships that circumnavigated our coast conducting live fire drills. So again, why would he consider dispatching any of our military to the Middle East?
It’s interesting that Albanese is still yet to have a face-to-face meeting with Donald Trump yet his military chiefs are discussing sending a peacekeeping force to Gaza with their US counterparts.
The Prime Minister should be devoting more of his time to resolving the problems of Australia instead of travelling overseas pretending he’s an important player in world politics.
Looking at the out of control crime in Victoria, maybe he should engage our military down these as a peacekeeping force.
Sorry I forgot, according to Premier Jacinta Allan there are no problems with rising crime in Victoria.
I suggest she take a late night stroll around Melbourne without her security detail and see how safe she feels.
B Thompson, Cowra
Deal yet to play out
Please Peta, the current Gaza peace deal is only just playing out and yet you say pro Palestinian activists should say thank you? (“Thumbs Down”, Credlin, 12/10)
How did the last peace plan go?
Let’s wait awhile and see if this one does work out. And no, I am far from one of their activists.
Personally I don’t trust Israel’s PM Benjamin Netanyahu.
Andrew Last, Neutral Bay
Middle East peace due to Trump
Congratulations to President Donald J Trump for bringing peace to the Middle East.
It only took one man with the will, the backbone, a lot of common sense and great vision to get the job done, and at the same time proving again how useless the UN really is.
As expected, Hamas will try to usurp the peace process. However, Israel and the US, as well as the so called Arab partners, need to keep their collective foot on the throat of Hamas to ensure it complies with the agreement. Only then will we see lasting peace and the rebuilding of Gaza for everyone.
My suggestion for rebuilding is simple.
Dismantle the UN and get rid of the leaners that suck money out of the place for no real benefit to anyone but themselves. Sell off the UN building which is prime New York real estate.
This must surely amount to hundreds of millions of dollars and at the same time the rebuilding of Gaza will not be a financial burden on the rest of the world.
Brendan Tout, Revesby
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Disingenuous Albo’s fawning over Palestine will make mending bridges with Trump a big obstacle
Daily Telegraph (Courier-Mail) | Piers Akerman | 19 October 2025
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese needs to mend fences with the US before his scheduled meeting with President Donald Trump this week.
He must make amends for the appalling foreign policy decisions he and Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong have made over the past two years. To say that the pair are a clown show is to be too kind.
Winning the applause of proscribed terrorist group Hamas after recognising the non-existent state of Palestine should have registered with Albanese and Wong, but they went further and granted even more Gazans refugee visas after minimal security checks even as Melbourne and Sydney host actively anti-Semitic followers of hateful imams.
Coming on top of assisting in the return to Australia of numerous female supporters of ISIS, this needs a lot of explaining.
One way Albanese could atone for this serious assault on what was once a cohesive Australian society would be to recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel – as the US and several other nations do already – and move our embassy from Tel Aviv to the ancient capital where the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, has sat since 1949.
Albanese and Wong ignore the fact that the Labor Party supported the admission of Israel – the only liberal democracy in the Middle East – to the fledgling United Nations.
In a further sign of atonement, it would be only fitting if Wong was appointed to the Palestinian Authority, in Ramallah, as Australia’s representative, akin to the role Palestinian charge d’affaires Noura Saleh plays in Canberra.
It would be injudicious to send her and her wife to Gaza, as the Gazans are not predisposed to welcoming members of the gay community, and, in fact, are noted for torturing them and tossing them from rooftops.
Wong could give the locals her lecture on diversity, equity and inclusion, which has been so stunningly unsuccessful across the Pacific and with our neighbours in Indonesia and Malaysia, where the Islamic communities frown upon identity politics.
Being a dyed-in-the-wool real estate broker, Albanese should offer the US a rare-earths deal to weaken China’s monopolistic hand. The US still has major questions for Australia regarding our ongoing national security in relation to the lack of action taken against pro-Palestine activist groups and the anti-Israel stance adopted by the government at the UN.
Not only has the government recognised an entity called Palestine – a state that has no borders, no currency and no capital and exists only in the minds of adolescents – our failure to support Trump’s peace initiative was highlighted when no Australian representative was at the historic meeting of world leaders in Egypt for the signing of the deal between the US and various Arab states.
Despite acting Prime Minister Richard Marles’ claim that it was principally a summit between leaders in the Middle East and Europe, representatives from Asia and South America were also present.
As our dozy DFAT officials were busily distributing refugee visas to Gazans, the Netherlands, Canada, Japan and Paraguay were represented – and even the president of the world soccer body, FIFA.
Israel has now released nearly 2000 healthy, well-fed Palestinians (including mass murderers) but Hamas has only partially kept its side of the bargain, releasing the remaining live hostages but not all the remains of those it murdered.
To no one’s surprise, Hamas lied when it said it could return those it had killed and now has resumed killing Arabs in Gaza, executing them in public without a word of protest from the pro-Palestine rabble.
Trump’s success in bringing home the surviving hostages and pausing Israel’s bombardment was recognised by the Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado, Venezuela’s main opposition leader, who has been in hiding in that country since last year’s disputed presidential elections.
Albanese has a long way to go to rebuild America’s trust in our nation. He could start by acknowledging Trump’s momentous achievement.
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Gaza-Egypt border crossing to remain closed: Netanyahu
Canberra Times / AAP | 19 October 2025
The Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt will remain closed until further notice, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says, adding its reopening will depend on Hamas handing over bodies of deceased hostages.
Netanyahu’s statement on Saturday came shortly after the Palestinian embassy in Egypt announced that the Rafah crossing, the main gateway for Gazans to leave and enter the enclave, would reopen on Monday for entry into Gaza.
Hamas said later on Saturday it will be handing over two more hostage bodies at 10pm local time, meaning 12 out of 28 bodies will have been handed over to Israel under a US-brokered ceasefire and hostage deal agreed between Israel and Hamas last week.
The dispute over the return of bodies underlines the fragility of the ceasefire and still has the potential to upset the deal along with other major issues that are included in US president Donald Trump’s 20-point plan to end the war.
As part of the deal, Hamas released all 20 living Israeli hostages it had been holding for two years, in return for almost 2000 Palestinian detainees and convicted prisoners jailed in Israel.
But Israel says that Hamas has been too slow to hand over bodies of deceased hostages it still holds. The militant group has so far returned 10 of 28 bodies and says that locating some of the bodies amid the vast destruction in Gaza will take time.
The deal requires Israel to return 360 bodies of Palestinian militants for the deceased Israeli hostages and so far it has handed over 15 bodies in return for each Israeli body it has received.
Rafah has largely been shut since May 2024. The ceasefire deal also includes the ramping up of aid into the enclave, where hundreds of thousands of people were determined in August to be affected by famine, according to the IPC global hunger monitor.
After cutting off all supplies for 11 weeks in March, Israel increased aid into Gaza in July, scaling it up further since the ceasefire.
Around 560 metric tons of food had entered Gaza per day on average since the US-brokered truce, but this was still well below the scale of need, according to the UN World Food Programme.
Formidable obstacles to US President Donald Trump’s plan to end the war still remain. Key questions of Hamas disarming and how Gaza will be governed, the make-up of an international “stabilisation force” and moves towards the creation of a Palestinian state have yet to be resolved.
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Israel has violated ceasefire 47 times and killed 38 Palestinians, says Gaza media office
Authorities urge UN to intervene ‘to protect unarmed civilian populations’ after attack on bus that killed 11
The Guardian | Lorenzo Tondo | 19 October 2025
Gaza’s media office has accused Israel of violating the ceasefire with Hamas 47 times since the truce came into effect in early October, killing 38 Palestinians and wounding another 143.
“These violations have included crimes of direct gunfire against civilians, deliberate shelling and targeting, and the arrest of a number of civilians, reflecting the occupation’s continued policy of aggression despite the declared end of the war,” reads the statement.
Authorities in Gaza called on “the United Nations and the guarantor parties of the agreement to intervene urgently to compel the occupation to end its ongoing aggression and to protect unarmed civilian populations”.
Benjamin Netanyahu meanwhile said the Rafah crossing – a crucial entry point for aid – would only reopen after Hamas hands over the bodies of all deceased hostages still held in Gaza.
“Prime Minister Netanyahu has directed that the Rafah crossing remain closed until further notice,” a statement from his office on Saturday read. “Its reopening will be considered based on how Hamas fulfils its obligations to return the hostages and the bodies of the deceased, and to implement the agreed-upon terms.”
Hamas later said it would hand over two more bodies of Israeli hostages on Saturday, at 10pm local time (7pm GMT).
Eleven members of a Palestinian family were killed by Israeli forces on Friday, described as the deadliest single violation of the fragile ceasefire since it took effect eight days ago. Gaza’s civil defence agency said the family were trying to reach their home in the Zeitoun neighbourhood of Gaza City when the bus they were in was attacked for allegedly crossing the “yellow line” that demarcates areas of Israeli army control.
“They had crossed the so-called ‘yellow line’, an imaginary boundary mentioned by the Israeli army,” said Mahmoud Basal, the spokesperson for the Gaza civil defence. “I am certain the family couldn’t distinguish between the yellow and red lines because there are no actual physical markers on the ground.”
Footage released by Gaza’s civil defence agency show the bodies of the family during the retrieval mission in conjunction with the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. The victims include seven children and three women.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said a “suspicious vehicle was identified crossing the yellow line and approaching IDF troops operating in the northern Gaza Strip”, adding: “The troops fired warning shots toward the suspicious vehicle, but the vehicle continued to approach the troops in a way that caused an imminent threat to them. The troops opened fire to remove the threat, in accordance with the agreement.”
Israel and Hamas have continued to trade blame over breaches of the truce. Israel accused the militant group of violating the ceasefire agreement by failing to return the remains of deceased hostages. On Monday, Hamas returned the last 20 surviving hostages but has handed back only 10 of 28 deceased captives, saying it would need specialist recovery equipment to retrieve the rest from the ruins of Gaza.
Turkey has deployed dozens of disaster relief specialists to help search for bodies under the rubble. Efforts to recover bodies over a week into the ceasefire continue, with the Palestinian death toll now above 68,000, according to Gaza’s health ministry.
Gaza’s civil defence agency estimates that the bodies of about 10,000 people are trapped under the debris and collapsed buildings. The task ahead of the rescuers is immense given that there is an estimated 60m tonnes of rubble across the territory.
Netanyahu’s office said on Saturday that the body of a deceased hostage returned overnight by Hamas has been identified as Eliyahu Margalit. He also confirmed that he planned to run in next year’s elections.
Israel returned the bodies of another 15 Palestinians to Gaza on Saturday, bringing the total number handed over to 135, the health ministry said. Doctors at Nasser hospital in Khan Younis said the bodies showed signs of torture and execution, including blindfolds, cuffed hands and bullet wounds in the head, according to doctors’ accounts.
Meanwhile, aid remains critically scarce in Gaza one week into the ceasefire, humanitarian agencies have warned, as Israel delays the entry of food convoys into the territory.
The Palestinian embassy in Egypt announced on Saturday that Palestinian citizens living in Egypt who want to return to Gaza will be able to travel via the Rafah crossing starting on Monday.
In a separate development on Saturday, an Israeli strike on a construction vehicle in southern Lebanon killed a man, the Lebanese health ministry reported.
Israel has repeatedly bombed Lebanon despite a November ceasefire that brought to an end more than a year of hostilities with the militant group Hezbollah that culminated in two months of open war.
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