Thirty Hours Over Gaza Graves to Identify Ran Gvili's Remains

For two days, four Israeli military units worked together in the field in Gaza locating and examining bodies until one of them was correctly identified as Sergeant Major Ran Gvili. The Israel Defense Forces described the effort as a joint operation by the Alexandroni Brigade, the Yahalom bomb disposal unit, Unit 6017 of the Medical Corps, and the Southern Reconnaissance Unit of the Military Rabbinate, known by its Hebrew acronym YASAR.

The rabbinate's reconnaissance soldiers were the first to reach each body. "When we began the work of locating the graves, we extracted the bodies and handled them together with the medical personnel of Unit 6017," said Major (Res.) R', a company commander in the unit, who was identified only by an initial. His teams had been training for the mission for several days beforehand. "There was almost nothing that could have prepared us for what we did and saw there, and yet, we knew exactly what we were getting into."

Identification by teeth, in a field, under threat

The decisive work was dental. "We scanned a large number of bodies and compared dental x-rays we took in the field, with Ran's," said Major M', a dental officer in Unit 6017 who specialises in medical identification and the study of death mechanisms. "We know the work well, and we try to achieve mental detachment. When we start a mission like this, we switch to automatic mode."

Independent accounts fill in the scale of that task. The Jerusalem Post reported on 30 January 2026 that Unit 6017 works from three forensic methods (fingerprints, dental analysis and DNA) and requires at least two matches for a positive identification, and that in Gvili's case the dental work was decisive. A dentist in the unit told the paper that the team had memorised Gvili's ante-mortem dental records before deploying: "Every chip and filing of his teeth, we knew by heart." The same report described roughly 250 bodies being exhumed in a northern Gaza cemetery before the right one was found, under conditions the officer summarised as being in enemy territory and having to work quickly while remaining careful.

Ynetnews reported that the operation was led by Southern Command forces headed by the Alexandroni Brigade under the 252nd Division, working with the Yahalom engineering unit, that more than twenty military dentists took part, and that the identification work itself ran for more than 24 hours after intelligence narrowed the search from hundreds of possible graves to a few dozen.

A rabbinate unit doing forensic work

YASAR belongs to the Military Rabbinate, which in the Israeli army is responsible for identifying the fallen and arranging their burial, a set of duties that sits at the intersection of religious law and forensic science. That intersection produced one of the more striking details in the IDF's account. Major M' is a Kohen, a member of the priestly lineage that Jewish law bars from contact with the dead, and could not initially serve in the unit. He sought and received rabbinical permission after 7 October and began assisting with identification in the Gaza-border communities, later taking part in operations in the north examining bodies of fallen hostages.

"We have been in operation since we were scrambled on October 7th," Major R' said. "In almost every casualty event, we were required to respond and provide body handling."

The last name on the list

The identification closed a file that had been open since the first day of the war. Gvili, a police officer, was killed on 7 October 2023 and his body was held in Gaza for 843 days; the Times of Israel reported on 26 January 2026 that his return meant that for the first time since 2014 no Israeli hostages, living or dead, remained in Gaza, and that his funeral was set for 29 January in his home town of Meitar.

Major R' learned of the identification back at base after thirty hours of continuous work. "At that moment, there was an immediate release. We hugged, we cried, and we also rejoiced; after all, we had been waiting for this moment for over two years."

What the account did not say

The IDF's account did not name the officers it quoted, give the location of the search, say how many bodies its own teams examined, or explain how the intelligence that directed them to the site was obtained. It did not describe what happened to the other remains that were exhumed and examined during the operation.