A Hostages and Missing Families Forum medical report outlines several risks to the bodies of the deceased hostages still being held in Gaza.
A medical report published on Tuesday by the Hostages and Missing Families Forum warns that the deceased hostages’ bodies could become unrecoverable, making it impossible to locate them or return them for burial.
The report outlines two major dimensions of risk: First, the loss of information: the concern that the whereabouts of many of the deceased hostages is known only to a few individuals who may be killed or disappear during the fighting, without leaving any documented record. As time passes, the intelligence gap deepens, and the possibility of obtaining direct, reliable information to guide recovery efforts diminishes.
The second risk, alongside the intelligence gaps, is damage to the integrity of the remains due to environmental conditions: conditions in Gaza – extreme heat, flooding, building collapses, and more – compromise the integrity of the remains and complicate their identification and understanding of the circumstances of their deaths in future investigations.
The Hostages and Missing Families Forum stated that on Israel’s Memorial Day for Fallen Soldiers and Victims of Terrorism, when Israel honors its fallen and commemorates their memory, the urgency to also recover the deceased hostages for dignified burial is sharply underscored.
The position paper warns that the passage of time erodes evidence, obliterates findings, and severely diminishes the chance of recovery, thereby also affecting the ability to facilitate personal and national healing. The authors call for urgent action to return all 59 hostages, including the 35 deceased hostages.
Prof. Hagai Levine, Head of the Health Team of the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, stated: “There is a real danger to the deceased hostages, one that could impair the ability to return them for proper burial. The dignified return of the fallen hostages for burial, alongside the return of the living for rehabilitation, is a fundamental condition for healing the personal, social, and national wound. It is a moral and national obligation of the State of Israel toward its citizens, part of the unwritten covenant upon which Israeli society rests. Without the return of the deceased hostages and in the absence of certainty, the families become the living-dead, and the fallen remain the dead-alive. This wound undermines the very trust upon which the social fabric relies.”
