The Last Body Held in Gaza Since 2014 Is Returned to Israel

The body of Lieutenant Hadar Goldin, an Israeli officer killed and taken into Gaza by Hamas in 2014, has been returned to Israel and formally identified, the Prime Minister's Office and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) confirmed on Sunday evening.

The identification was completed by the National Center for Forensic Medicine, working with the Israel Police and the Military Rabbinate, according to the statement issued by the Prime Minister's Office. IDF representatives then informed the family that their son had been returned to Israel. The statement referred to him as a deceased abductee.

The body was found in an area of Rafah, at the southern end of the Gaza Strip, that is held by Israeli troops, Al Jazeera reported. Rafah lies behind the Yellow Line established under the current ceasefire framework. Some 200 Hamas gunmen are stranded in tunnels on the Israeli side of that line, and Israeli officials have reportedly indicated a willingness to let those men leave in exchange for the return of Goldin's body. Neither the Prime Minister's Office nor the IDF referred to any such arrangement in their announcements.

Why Rafah lies on the Israeli side of the truce line

The Yellow Line is not a border. It is the freeze line to which Israeli forces pulled back when the American-brokered ceasefire took effect in October 2025, and Israel initially retained control of roughly 53 per cent of the Gaza Strip behind it, with further staged withdrawals written into the deal, according to the Council on Foreign Relations. That is why a body recovered in Rafah could be described as lying in territory under Israeli control while the town itself remains part of Gaza.

How Israel puts a name to remains returned from Gaza

Every set of remains handed back goes to the National Center for Forensic Medicine in Tel Aviv, widely known by the name of its neighbourhood, Abu Kabir. Identification runs along three parallel tracks: a full-body CT scan searching for implants, healed fractures and other unique markers; DNA extracted and matched against samples given by relatives; and dental X-rays compared with a person's own records. A straightforward case can be settled in about an hour and a half, while a difficult one can take several days, the Jerusalem Post reported in October 2025.

The transfers themselves pass through the International Committee of the Red Cross, which describes its part strictly as that of a neutral intermediary. The organisation says it will not take part in, be present at, or facilitate any transfer of human remains without an agreement already in place between the parties, and that it does not sort, screen or examine the dead; that, it says, is the parties' own responsibility, according to its published guidance on its work on the hostages.

The ambush in Rafah that started the case

Goldin was 23 when he was killed on 1 August 2014, roughly an hour into a 72-hour truce brokered by the United Nations and the United States during that summer's Gaza war. Hamas fighters emerged from a tunnel in Rafah and attacked soldiers of the Givati Brigade's reconnaissance unit; three were killed and Goldin's body was dragged underground, the Times of Israel reported. He was declared killed in action the next day and promoted posthumously.

His name was bound from then on to that of Sergeant Oron Shaul, killed in Shejaiya weeks earlier in the same war and likewise held in Gaza. Israeli forces recovered Shaul's body in January 2025, hours before a ceasefire came into force; a compiled account of the two cases dates that recovery to 19 January. Goldin's family held a funeral in their home town of Kfar Saba, in central Israel, two days after the ambush, with no body to bury.

He would have been 34 on the day his remains came home. He had become engaged to Edna Sarusi shortly before he was killed, and is survived by his parents, Simcha and Leah, and his twin brother, Tzur.

What the announcements did not say

Neither statement addressed whether the Hamas fighters trapped behind the Yellow Line would in fact be allowed out, and neither described how the body was located or by whom. No cause of death was given, and nothing was said about the condition of the remains. The release put the number of bodies still held in Gaza at three Israelis and one Thai national, without naming them.