Ran Gvili, Last Hostage Returned From Gaza, to Be Buried in Meitar

The funeral of Ran Gvili was to be held on Wednesday in Meitar, his home town in the northern Negev, according to the notice issued on 26 January 2026. It carried no further detail: no time, no place of assembly, no order of service.

Gvili was 24 and a police officer in Yasam, the Israel Police counter-terrorism unit, and he was killed on 7 October 2023 while fighting at Kibbutz Alumim, a community in the western Negev, the Times of Israel reported. He was awaiting surgery on a broken shoulder when reports of the attack began to reach him, and went to the scene instead. The military declared him dead in January 2024, according to the Jerusalem Post, which reported that he had helped people fleeing the Nova music festival before he was killed.

Eight hundred and forty-three days

His body was taken into the Gaza Strip. Of the 251 people seized on 7 October 2023, Gvili was the last still held, and he was held longest: 843 days between his death and the return of his remains, the Times of Israel reported. The Hostages and Missing Families Forum summed it up in four words the paper quoted: “First to go in; last to return.”

How he was found

Israeli forces located the body on 26 January 2026 in a cemetery in Gaza City's eastern Shejaiya district, on the Israeli-held side of the so-called yellow line dividing the territory, the Times of Israel reported. It said forensic teams had examined roughly 250 bodies in the search, and that identification was confirmed by dental records, fingerprints and further tests. His mother, Talik Gvili, was quoted describing the recovery as a relief “even though we hoped for a different ending”.

Why the recovery mattered beyond one family

The return completed the first stage of the United States-brokered Gaza ceasefire, under which Hamas was to hand back every hostage, living and dead, NBC News reported on the day the remains were identified. The next stage, it said, was to include the partial reopening of the Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt, the disarmament of Hamas and the creation of an international security force for the territory.

Meitar

Meitar is a small town on the northern edge of the Negev desert, near Beersheba, and about fifty minutes' drive from Alumim, where Gvili was killed, according to the Times of Israel. The paper later reported that the service on Wednesday 28 January drew thousands of people to the town's sports field, among them the president, the prime minister and the speaker of the Knesset, and that Gvili's mother, father and sister spoke; the Times of Israel reported that mourners lined the roads as the procession passed.

What the notice did not say

The announcement of the funeral gave only the day and the town. It did not set out the timing or the route of the procession, whether the burial would be military or civil, or what arrangements were being made for the numbers expected. Everything in this article beyond the day and the place is drawn from published reporting rather than from the notice itself.