Two senior Trump administration officials gathered reporters for a phone briefing on Oct. 15 to argue that the terror group had not violated the ceasefire agreement. One said: “We’ve heard a lot of people saying, ‘Hamas violated the deal, because not all the bodies have been returned.’ The understanding we had with them [about the 72-hour deadline] was we get all the live hostages out, which they did honor that.” The other one said that it would have been “almost impossible for Hamas—even if they knew where all the 28 bodies were—to mobilize and get them all.”
Separately, U.S. President Donald Trump told reporters on Oct. 15: “It’s a gruesome process…. They’re digging and they’re finding a lot of bodies. Then they have to separate the bodies. Some of those bodies have been in there a long time, and some of them are under rubble. They have to remove rubble. Some are in tunnels … that are way down under the earth.”
