Body identified as Israeli soldier Hadar Goldin with the remains of four other deceased captives still in Gaza.
Published On 9 Nov 2025
Israel has received the body of a soldier held in Gaza for more than a decade after he was killed in an ambush by Hamas fighters in 2014 during the last major ground assault on the Palestinian enclave.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said on Sunday the remains were handed over to Israeli forces in Gaza by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) after Hamas transferred the body to the aid organisation.
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Formal identification of Lieutenant Hadar Goldin, 23, was confirmed by Israeli forensics teams.
At the start of a weekly cabinet meeting, Netanyahu said holding the body for so long has caused “great agony for his family, which will now be able to give him a Jewish burial”.
“Lieutenant Hadar Goldin fell in heroic combat during Operation Protective Edge,” Israel’s leader said.
The Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s military wing, said the body was retrieved on Saturday from a tunnel in the Yebna refugee camp in Rafah in southern Gaza.
Goldin was killed on August 1, 2014, two hours after a ceasefire took effect and ended that year’s war between Israel and Hamas. He was part of an Israeli unit tasked with locating and destroying Hamas tunnels.
Another Israeli soldier, Oron Shaul, was also killed in the six-week war, and his body was returned earlier this year.
There are now four deceased abductees remaining in Gaza to be returned under the terms of a ceasefire that began last month. Hamas has so far released 20 living captives and 24 bodies.
For each body returned, Israel has been releasing the remains of 15 Palestinians. Ahmed Dheir, director of forensic medicine at the Nasser Medical Co