In line with the bizarre Israeli announcement of Oct. 10, Israel has reinterpreted the agreement they signed, to now claim that Hamas is in a blatant violation for not turning over all 28 bodies of deceased hostages by Oct. 13, and that Israel will take action. On Oct. 13, Defense Minister Israel Katz posted on X: “Hamas’s announcement of the expected return of four bodies today constitutes a failure to meet its commitments” and “any delay or deliberate avoidance will be considered a blatant violation of the agreement and will be met accordingly.”
Israel’s UN Ambassador Danny Danon stayed on point, telling CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer that the bodies “were supposed to arrive today.… Apparently, Hamas is not delivering what they are supposed to in terms of the bodies of the deceased hostages. I hope that there will be some changes before the end of the day.”
Not only is it physically impossible to locate most of the 28 by today, but Israel is actually part of a team set up by the agreement (along with the U.S., Türkiye, Egypt, and Qatar), tasked to spend the next days and weeks searching through the rubble for the missing bodies. The first 4 bodies were delivered today, the action that Katz deemed “a blatant violation.” In reality, the only blatant actions here are nakedly fraudulent rewriting, after the fact, of the agreement—in preparation for unnamed retaliatory measures.
U.S. President Donald Trump appeared to be aware that the joint task force would be spending some time. Speaking on Oct. 13 in Egypt, he confirmed that “next steps” in Gaza would include “going and looking for bodies. … It’s a pretty gruesome task. They know where numbers are. … They know the areas. They’re going to be finding quite a few of them.”
It is not only some of the 28 bodies of the deceased hostages that are under the rubble of buildings bombed by the Israelis. On Oct.13 there were 63 more killings accounted for by the Gaza Health Ministry, only 3 of whom were killed in the last 24 hours. Some 60 had been killed earlier, but the bodies are only now being located and added to the totals. As rubble is cleared away, it seems inevitable that the count of 67,800 dead bodies over the last two years will be shown to be a dramatic undercount.
