Israel prepares to receive more bodies tonight

Preparations are under way in Israel to receive additional bodies overnight, and reports said Hamas intends to return five bodies, although no official statement has confirmed the number that will be returned.

Yesterday, Hamas returned three bodies of captives: Uriel Baruch, Tamir Nimrodi and Eitan Levi.

The Israeli army received another body from the Red Cross yesterday evening, but said the National Forensic Medicine Center confirmed it was not one of the captives; reports said it belonged to an agent with the occupation forces who was killed during the fighting in northern Gaza.

So far, the resistance in the Gaza Strip is holding 21 other bodies of Israeli captives.

Israel had previously acknowledged Hamas’s technical difficulty in locating all the bodies within the official deadline (72 hours from approval of the agreement), and from the outset estimated the process could take many weeks and that it might not be possible to return all the bodies.