Hamas Hands Over Body of Hadar Goldin, Israeli Soldier Held Since 2014

Hamas on Sunday handed over the remains of an Israeli soldier held by the Palestinian militant group for more than a decade, bringing bitter closure to a family that waited 11 years to bury him.

Hamas identified the deceased soldier as Lt. Hadar Goldin, who was killed in Gaza during the militant group’s 2014 war with Israel. He was 23 at the time. The Israeli government said it had confirmed his identity in forensic testing.

“We brought our son to Jewish burial,” said Simha Goldin, his father, in a televised statement standing beside his wife outside their home in Kfar Saba, a city near Tel Aviv.

“You don’t leave soldiers behind on the battlefield,” he added, in an implicit criticism of the government for not securing his son’s return earlier, “because it’s a value — and you don’t compromise on values for interests."

The return of Lieutenant Goldin’s body was the latest step in fulfilling the terms of a rocky cease-fire between Israel and Hamas that began in mid-October, ending more than two years of devastating war.

Under the U.S.-backed truce agreement, Hamas handed over the last 20 surviving Israeli hostages and committed to returning 28 sets of remains, including the body of Lieutenant Goldin.

Hamas released the living captives almost immediately, and has been handing over the remains one or two at a time. Israeli officials have accused Hamas of delaying the handover of some corpses to potentially use as leverage to extract more concessions from Israel.

Hamas officials say they are working to recover remains as quickly as possible but have needed time and hard-to-access heavy machinery to locate and dig up bodies buried under the rubble of buildings destroyed by Israel’s heavy bombardments of the territory.

The vast majority of the hostages Hamas held in Gaza during the war were abducted in the deadly Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel. About 250 people — most still alive — were taken back to Gaza as hostages on that day, according to the Israeli authorities.

Lieutenant Goldin’s body, however, had already been in Gaza for nearly a decade at that point.

His abduction became one of the most fraught episodes of the 50-day 2014 war, which killed more than 2,000 Palestinians and 70 Israelis.

Roughly an hour after a brief humanitarian cease-fire went into effect on Aug. 1, 2014, Hamas fighters clashed with Lieutenant Goldin’s unit while it was on patrol in the southern city of Rafah. Two soldiers were killed in the skirmish, and Lieutenant Goldin was taken.

It remains unclear whether Lieutenant Goldin was alive when he was captured.

In response to the ambush, the Israeli military unleashed a massive barrage of artillery fire and airstrikes throughout Rafah. The Israeli military has said it believed Lieutenant Goldin was killed in the firefight, not by the subsequent Israeli bombardment.

At the time, the streets were crowded with displaced Palestinian civilians heading home from where they had taken shelter, believing a truce was in place, said rights group Amnesty International, which later published an investigation of the episode. At least 135 Palestinians were killed, according to Amnesty.

Lieutenant Goldin’s family spent more than a decade calling on the Israeli government to pressure Hamas into releasing their son’s body. At times, they urged contentious policies, such as tying Israeli permission for Covid-19 vaccines to enter Gaza to the release of their son’s body.

“Unfortunately, we went through many disappointments,” Leah Goldin, his mother, said in her public statement on Sunday. “The biggest disappointment was during the coronavirus pandemic, she added.

“Those who failed to act were the decision makers in Israel.”

Lieutenant Goldin was raised in central Israel and had a twin brother. Shortly before his death, he proposed to his girlfriend, and they had begun preparing for their wedding, according to a statement from the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, which the Goldin family belongs to.

Even before the latest Gaza war began, Hamas for years had been seeking to trade two living Israelis and the remains of another Israeli soldier abducted in 2014.

Hamas’s leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, had hoped to swap the Israelis for a large number of Palestinians imprisoned by Israel for militancy.

Mr. Sinwar later became one of the masterminds of the Oct. 7 attack, a core aim of which was to abduct more captives to force Israel to release Palestinian prisoners in trades. He was killed by Israeli forces last year in Rafah.

Isabel Kershner and Natan Odenheimer contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section

A

, Page

7

of the New York edition

with the headline:

Hamas Hands Over Body Of Soldier Held Since ’14. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe