The United States and Israel are mounting a joint effort to recover the remains of 19 Israeli hostages still missing in Gaza, with Washington reportedly preparing to offer cash rewards to Gazans who help locate the bodies.
“We’re probably going to put together some sort of program where we’ll ask people to help us locate bodies — and we’ll pay rewards for that kind of good behavior,” one White House official tells FOX News. “I can tell you that we’re not going to leave here until everybody comes home.”
“We’ve heard a lot of people saying well, you know, Hamas violated the deal, because not all the bodies have been returned. I think the understanding we had with them was we’d get all the live hostages out, which they did honor that.”
So far, the latest 20 living hostages have been returned to Israel, along with the bodies of nine others. Nineteen remain unaccounted for, with Hamas claiming it no longer knows their whereabouts and that “significant efforts and special equipment” would be required to locate them in the devastated Gaza Strip.
Overnight, Al Jazeera broadcast footage purporting to show Hamas operatives in southern Gaza’s Khan Younis digging through debris with bulldozers as they searched for hostage remains.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Israel has informed mediators it believes Hamas is withholding information on six more bodies, using them as potential bargaining chips, while a senior Israeli official told Channel 12 that there is still “a double-digit number of hostages” that Hamas is holding back.
Meanwhile, Israel has reportedly authorized Turkish rescue specialists trained in earthquake recovery to join the multinational search for the missing hostage bodies. Working alongside Israeli military engineers and intelligence units, the teams are deploying drones and ground-penetrating sensors to scour flattened neighborhoods.
Any remains found would be transferred from Gaza for identification by Israel’s National Forensic Institute in Tel Aviv. Earlier this week, the institute announced that a body handed over by Hamas did not match any missing hostage but rather a dead Gazan.
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