The office of the Israeli Prime Minister received on Sunday the remains of officer Hadar Goldin, who was killed in the 2014 Gaza war, after the Hamas movement announced it had found them in a tunnel in the city of Rafah, south of the Strip, on Saturday.
Israeli forensic experts are expected to identify the remains after they are transferred to Israel. The Chief of Staff of the Israeli army, Eyal Zamir, met with Goldin's family to inform them of the latest available information about his fate since his death. Goldin, 23 years old, was a member of an Israeli unit tasked with identifying and destroying Hamas tunnels when he was killed on August 1, 2014, hours after a humanitarian ceasefire took effect. The army explained that his team was shot at by gunmen who killed him and seized his body, which made efforts to return his remains ongoing for more than a decade. It is worth mentioning that Israel had included Goldin's name on the list of deceased hostages whose remains it seeks to recover under the ceasefire agreement mediated by the United States to end the war in Gaza. It is also worth mentioning that the Israeli army had previously succeeded this year in recovering the body of another Israeli soldier, Aaron Shaul, who was killed during the recent war in October 2023 after a Hamas attack on southern Israel, while previous attempts to return the remains of Goldin and Shaul in previous exchange operations failed.
