CAIRO, October 15. /TASS/. Hamas insists that the remains of an unidentified body handed over to Israel on Tuesday belong to a soldier whose body was taken from the battlefield by radicals in the northern Gaza Strip, Al Jazeera reported.

A Hamas official told the Qatari television channel that the body was taken in May 2024 in the Jabalia refugee camp. The name of the dead soldier was never disclosed.

Earlier on Wednesday, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said experts from Israel’s National Institute of Forensic Medicine had failed to identify one of the bodies received from the Gaza Strip on Tuesday.

On Monday morning, Hamas and its allies released 20 Israeli hostages who had been kept in the enclave over the past two years, under a Gaza ceasefire plan. On Monday evening, the first four coffins containing the remains of dead abductees were handed over to Israel through the International Committee of the Red Cross.

The Israeli government expressed dissatisfaction that, during the first stage of returning the remains, the militants handed over only four bodies out of 28. Defense Minister Israel Katz called this a violation of the agreement and warned that further delays by the militants would have repercussions. Four more coffins were transferred to Israel on October 14, bringing the number of coffins returned to the Jewish state to eight.

Forensic experts have identified seven dead Israeli hostages. Their names have been made public, and their bodies have been transferred to their families for burying.