Blackcap Blog

Published at 11:14 on 29 October 2025

Hamas claims having trouble locating them. Israel claims Hamas is deliberately not releasing the bodies. Who is more believable?

In this particular situation, I think it is Hamas. Not because I like them (I don’t), but simply because the Hamas line jibes better with reality. Even the New York Times, hardly a pro-Hamas publication, states “devastation in the enclave complicates the retrieval of all remains.”

Because of course it would. Years of relentless bombing have pulverized Gaza. There is ample photographic evidence of this. So many bombs have been dropped in some areas that a significant part of the (in)famous network of tunnels Hamas excavated has no doubt collapsed. Those same tunnels were doubtless used by Hamas to hide some of their captives. Those bodies are now many meters underground. Even the captives held in buildings are going to be buried under several meters of rubble, if those buildings were bombed. And all of it happened in a chaotic war situation with hastily-planned last-minute moves, of which accurate records were almost certainly not kept (and even when records were kept, the damage from the attacks has in many cases destroyed them).

To expect prompt delivery of all remains is thus highly unrealistic. The Socialist Republic of Vietnam is still to this very day finding and repatriating remains of American servicemen who perished in a war that ended fifty years ago. For decades, there were endless conspiracy theories circulating that Vietnam was deliberately not returning bodies, or even still holding captives as prisoners of war, long after the Paris Peace Accords were signed and the conflict ended. None of these allegations have ever been substantiated.

Every war has its missing. There are missing servicemen from World War I that are still unaccounted for. The sad reality is that a few of these captives in Gaza will probably never have their bodies located and repatriated. (Yes, I know the Hamas captives were generally civilians and not combatants, but the general conditions that make their bodies hard to locate are fundamentally the same.)

Finally, Netanyahu benefits if there is a war going on. He’s not a very popular leader, and he has a lot of scandals to his name. Trump had to twist his arm almost to the point of breaking it in order to compel him to agree to a cease fire. Because of course he did. Netanyahu wants war. War is a distraction from his scandals and unpopularity. Even some normally very staid sources reluctant to criticize Israel have pointed this out. Israeli opposition figures point it out frequently.

So of course Netanyahu is going to demand the unrealistic and the impossible. It gives him a pretext to end the ceasefire and continue holding on to power.