A Hamas official said on Saturday that the terror group had recovered the body of Lt. Hadar Goldin, an IDF soldier who was killed and abducted by the terror group during the 2014 Gaza war.

A senior officer in Hamas’s military wing told Qatar’s Al Jazeera that Goldin’s body had been located in an IDF-held area of southern Gaza’s Rafah. The source added that the bodies of six “martyrs” — apparently referring to Hamas fighters — were also recovered.

In a video the terror group issued of the recovery, operatives pinned the name “Hadar Goldin” to a body bag dug out from the sands.

The terror group did not immediately announce its intention to return the body, which it has held for 4,117 days, to Israel.

Following the Hamas claim that Goldin’s remains had been recovered, IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen Eyal Zamir visited the home of Leah and Simcha Goldin, Hadar’s parents. The family said in a statement that they were awaiting official confirmation of the return of Hadar’s body to Israel.

They said that the IDF chief had come to update them “on the tremendous efforts to free the hostages, and we salute everyone involved in this national mission.”

“An entire nation is waiting for Hadar to be returned to us. This is a mission that must and can be accomplished for all of us,” Goldin’s family said. “We are waiting for official confirmation that Hadar has returned to Israel. We don’t give up on anyone in this country, ever. We ask everyone to remain calm. Until it’s final, it’s not over.”

The IDF said in a statement of its own that Zamir had visited the family to update them on the details currently known to the military regarding Hadar’s body.

“The chief of staff reiterated his personal and the IDF’s commitment to bringing back Hadar and all the fallen hostages and emphasized the importance of restraint at these sensitive moments, until his arrival and the completion of the necessary checks and verification,” the military said.

An unnamed security source told the Ynet news outlet that there was a growing assessment in Israel that the body was indeed Goldin’s, but cautioned that further details were still needed. Israel is highly unlikely to make a conclusive assessment as to the identity before receiving the body for forensic testing.

Part of a wider deal

A report on Channel 12 news indicated the subject of Goldin’s return could be more complicated than that of other hostages’ bodies, with Hamas tying the matter to Israel allowing 100-200 Hamas terrorists holed up in a tunnel under Israel-controlled Rafah safe passage in return — an issue which has been under debate for several days.

The Trump administration has reportedly been pressuring Israel to allow the trapped terror operatives safe passage for Goldin’s return. According to a White House plan reported by Israel’s Channel 12, after Goldin’s body is returned, the terrorists will surrender and hand over their arms, Israel will pardon them, and they will then go into exile or into the Hamas-controlled area of Gaza. The tunnel in which they are hiding will be destroyed, the network added.

Top White House advisers Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner may come to Israel this week to close the deal, according to the report. Solving the episode under the terms of the US proposal would serve as a model for Hamas’s peaceful disarmament, an American official told the outlet.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu previously indicated he had no intention of making a deal regarding the trapped terror gunmen, with a Monday statement attributed to an “Israeli official” — often a euphemism for Netanyahu’s office — saying the premier “is not allowing safe passage for 200 Hamas terrorists.”

The Hamas announcement that it had found Goldin’s body came hours after the Saudi al-Hadath newspaper reported that Hamas operatives and Red Cross vehicles were heading to the Jenina neighborhood of Rafah to search for the body of one of the five deceased hostages still in Gaza.

Defense officials said earlier this week that Goldin’s body was being held in the area, although the IDF denied having any intelligence indicating that his remains were held with the trapped gunmen, and the Channel 12 report on Monday said they indeed apparently were not.

Goldin was killed in a Hamas breach of 2014 ceasefire

Givati fighter Goldin was killed and abducted during the 2014 war in Gaza also known as Operation Protective Edge.

At 9:05 a.m. on August 1, 2014, just over an hour after the start of a 72-hour humanitarian ceasefire in the war brokered by the UN and the US, Hamas gunmen emerged from a tunnel in the southeastern part of Rafah and attacked troops of the Givati Brigade’s reconnaissance unit, killing three soldiers, including Goldin — whose body was dragged by the terror operatives back into their tunnel.

The following day, the IDF announced that Goldin had been killed in combat before his abduction, and he was posthumously promoted to the rank of lieutenant.

Days earlier, Hamas had killed and abducted the body of Staff Sgt. Oron Shaul. Months later, the terror group would go on to capture two mentally unwell Israeli civilians who entered Gaza while in distress in two separate incidents, Avera Mengistu and Hisham al-Sayed.

For almost a decade, until the Hamas assault of October 7, 2023, the four men — two slain soldiers and two live civilians — were the sole Israeli hostages held by Hamas, and their plight and their families’ struggle to bring them back often failed to garner significant public attention or government action.

Various indirect talks were held over the years, often with Egypt serving as an intermediary, but they failed to yield any results, as Hamas was reportedly demanding the mass release of Palestinian prisoners in exchange for the four men, and Israel was refusing to give in.

Goldin’s parents and his twin brother, Tzur, were at the forefront of the fight to recover the hostages, with Tzur establishing the Goldin Foundation to fight for their return.

A basis for the Oct. 7 families’ struggle

After October 7, the foundation became the basis of the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, the ad hoc organization that represented the families of the 251 hostages seized during the Hamas-led invasion and massacre, and the Goldin family has been active in the forum ever since.

The process of being counted with the families of the October 7 hostages was not a simple one, however. In July of this year, Leah Goldin told The Times of Israel that the IDF initially refused to include their son and Oron Shaul on the list of abductees, saying they were “a different matter.”

“For us, that was worse than October 7. And we didn’t accept it,” she said.

Eventually, after intense lobbying, including appeals to former IDF chief and then-cabinet member Gadi Eisenkot and then-defense minister Yoav Gallant, the decision was reversed.

The initial refusal to include the two was far from the first time that the Goldin family had to fight to keep their son on the country’s agenda.

In particular, the family has been critical of Netanyahu, accusing him of not doing enough or showing enough concern for their plight.

In 2019, Simcha Goldin, Hadar’s father, staged a protest outside the Knesset with a 10-meter-tall inflatable chicken, to demand that the government take a much harsher stance against Hamas, saying it needed to “change the equation in which Hamas kidnaps soldiers and uses them as an asset.”

He said that Israel instead needed to “move to a situation where the kidnapping of soldiers constitutes a burden for Hamas: one which carries a heavy political and economic price. Peace in exchange for peace. Humanitarian moves for humanitarian moves.”

He has also been critical of Blue and White chair Benny Gantz, who was the chief of staff when Goldin was killed and abducted.

In 2020, after a ceremony marking six years since the 2014 Gaza War, he told Gantz that the family wanted “actions, not words,” in response to Gantz insisting that the government was doing “everything in our power and more” to return Hadar.

“Those are just words,” Goldin countered. “You said that last year and all the years before. We are asking for actions, not words.”

The family’s insistence that the government was not doing enough appeared to have been validated by State Comptroller Matanyahu Englman when a report published by his office in January 2023 found that the job description of Israel’s chief negotiator on behalf of the Hamas hostages had never been formally established.

The negotiators, it found, had operated over the years without the Prime Minister’s Office ever actually establishing the responsibilities, authority, or any detailed framework of the role.

At the time of the report, the position of hostage envoy in the Prime Minister’s Office was vacant, as Yaron Blum had left the role the previous October. It was only after October 7, 2023, that Netanyahu appointed Gal Hirsch to the post and vastly expanded its scope.