Sahar Baruch, 27, and Amiram Cooper, 85, Named After Handover

Two sets of remains handed over by Hamas earlier in the day were confirmed on Thursday night to be those of Sahar Baruch and Amiram Cooper, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office announced.

Baruch, 27, was from Kibbutz Be'eri, one of the farming communities close to the Gaza boundary. He was taken captive on 7 October 2023 during an assault that killed his grandmother, Geula, and his brother, Edan. The family had fled their home after it was attacked with grenades and set alight; Baruch went back to fetch an inhaler for his asthmatic brother and was seized, while Edan was killed. In January 2024 the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) confirmed that Baruch had died during a failed rescue attempt: soldiers who entered a building to reach another hostage came upon him instead, and gunfire from Hamas, and possibly from Israeli forces, killed him.

Cooper, 85, was from Kibbutz Nir Oz and was taken the same day along with his wife, Nurit, who was released sixteen days later. His death was confirmed in June 2024 on the basis of intelligence assessments. Hamas had earlier claimed he was killed in an Israeli air strike, but the IDF's findings indicated he had been shot months before that. Born in Haifa in 1938, Cooper was one of the founders of Nir Oz and had lived there since 1957; an economist by profession, he spent decades writing poetry and songs. He is survived by his wife, four children and 11 grandchildren.

How the handovers work under the October ceasefire

Under the American-brokered agreement that took effect in October 2025, Hamas undertook to return all 48 remaining hostages, living and dead, within 72 hours. The 20 living captives came out on 13 October; the bodies came back in a slow drip. Only four of the 28 deceased were handed over anywhere near the deadline, and those came hours late; another 13 had followed by the time of this transfer, the Times of Israel reported. The Council on Foreign Relations records that Israel returned the bodies of 15 Palestinians for each deceased hostage received.

The transfers themselves are carried out by the International Committee of the Red Cross, which is careful to define its role narrowly. It says it acts only as a neutral intermediary, will not take part in any transfer of remains without an agreement already agreed between the parties, and does not sort, screen or examine the dead, according to its published guidance.

The institute that names the returned

Identification is done at the National Center for Forensic Medicine in Tel Aviv, known by the name of its neighbourhood, Abu Kabir. Remains are put through a full-body CT scan to find implants, healed fractures or other individual markers; DNA is extracted and matched against samples from relatives; and dental X-rays are compared with a person's records. Straightforward cases can be closed in about an hour and a half, complex ones can take days, and the institute had identified more than 50 hostages killed in captivity by October 2025, the Jerusalem Post reported. That is why identifications are announced late at night, hours after a handover.

What is still unclear

Forensic experts were continuing to examine the remains to establish more about the circumstances of both deaths, and no findings had been published. The statement did not say where in Gaza either body had been held, or how Hamas located them. The original release put the number of hostages whose remains were still in Gaza at 11.