Army Chief's Visit to the Goldin Family Signals a Body May Return

Israel's most senior soldier visited the family of Lieutenant Hadar Goldin on Saturday night, a call that raised expectations that the officer's body, held in Gaza since 2014, was about to be handed back.

Lieutenant General Eyal Zamir, Chief of the General Staff of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), met Goldin's parents, Simcha and Leah. The meeting followed a claim by a senior Hamas source, quoted by the Qatari broadcaster Al Jazeera, that Goldin's body had been found in a part of Rafah, at the southern tip of the Gaza Strip, that is under Israeli control. Hamas gave no indication of whether it intended to return the remains.

Rafah lies behind the Yellow Line established under the current ceasefire framework. Some 200 Hamas gunmen are stranded in tunnels on the Israeli side of that line, and Israeli officials have reportedly indicated a willingness to let them leave in exchange for the return of Goldin's body.

Why the men in the Rafah tunnels became a bargaining chip

The Yellow Line is the freeze line to which Israeli troops withdrew when the ceasefire brokered by the United States took effect in October 2025. Behind it Israel initially held roughly 53 per cent of the Gaza Strip, with further staged pullbacks written into the agreement, according to the Council on Foreign Relations. Fighters who did not withdraw west of the line before it was drawn were left inside Israeli-held ground: a group with no route home and, for Israel, a piece of leverage. The line was not physically marked at first, and Israel later began setting yellow-painted concrete blocks along it, according to a compiled account of the line's history, which also records the same 53 per cent figure.

What happened in Rafah in 2014

Goldin was killed on 1 August 2014, during a 72-hour truce in that summer's Gaza war brokered by the United Nations and the United States. A Hamas squad came up out of a tunnel and ambushed his unit, killing him and two other soldiers. He was 23, and reconnaissance troops of the Givati Brigade were the unit attacked, the Times of Israel reported.

He was the last Israeli whose remains had been held in Gaza from before the attacks of 7 October 2023. His case was long paired with that of Sergeant Oron Shaul, killed in Shejaiya weeks earlier in the same war and also seized; Israeli forces recovered Shaul's body in January 2025, hours before a ceasefire came into effect, according to a compiled chronology of the two cases.

Although the body remained in Gaza, the Goldin family held a funeral in their home town of Kfar Saba, in central Israel, two days after the ambush. Goldin would have been 34 on the day of Zamir's visit. He had become engaged to Edna Sarusi shortly before he was killed, and is survived by his parents and his twin brother, Tzur.

Earlier the same Saturday, Israel confirmed that a body returned by Hamas the previous night was that of 61-year-old Lior Rudaeff of Kibbutz Nir Yitzhak.

What happened next

The speculation proved right. The remains were handed over through the Red Cross the following day and identified at the Abu Kabir forensic institute in Tel Aviv, and the Prime Minister's Office confirmed on the evening of 9 November 2025 that they were Goldin's, the Times of Israel reported.

What was still unclear at the time

The IDF did not say what was discussed at the meeting in the Goldin home, and Zamir's visit carried no official announcement. Nothing was confirmed about a safe-passage deal for the stranded gunmen, and Hamas made no public commitment. The release put the number of bodies still in Gaza at four Israelis and one foreign national, without naming them.