After years of uncertain waiting, months of outraged pleading, and weeks of fretful searching, Israel has finally recovered the body of the last hostage taken into Gaza by Islamist terrorists on October 7, 2023. The moment turns a page in Israel’s defensive war against Iran’s network of jihadi proxies. Now that the last hostage’s remains have been recovered, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu can turn his full attention to Israel’s other war aim: ensuring that an attack like October 7 can never happen again.

On October 7, 2023, terrorists affiliated with Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and other terrorist groups (including a handful employed by U.N. agencies) swarmed across the border into Israel in an unprovoked surprise attack. The invaders made no distinction between military and civilian Israelis as they slaughtered, burned, and committed unspeakable acts of depravity. To add insult to injury, the terrorists returned to Gaza with 251 kidnapped hostages, which they planned to use as bargaining chips to derail Israel’s inevitable retaliation and held in horrid conditions.

Israel tried everything to rescue the hostages: one-sided prisoner exchanges, rescue missions, even an all-out invasion of Gaza. Despite Hamas’s stubborn negotiating, in between bouts of fighting Israel, they managed to get many of the hostages released in small batches over time — in exchange for releasing much larger numbers of Palestinians captured during the war.

All this time, anti-Semitic mania traversed the globe like a wildfire, threatening Jews of every nationality and prompting Western governments to downgrade their relationships with Israel. This was a cruel irony, because what inspired this anti-Semitism was Israel’s war to recover the hostages. The very fact that there were hostages remained an ever-present testimony to the fact that Hamas started the war with an unprovoked terror attack. But the anti-Semites who expressed concern for the fate of Palestinians could not be bothered by these inconvenient facts; those with the most seared consciences even tore down posters memorializing the hostages.

Finally, on the two-year anniversary of the initial terrorist attack, Israel received back the last living hostages held by Hamas in October 2025. Still, more than two dozen bodies of deceased hostages lay scattered across Gaza in locations unknown. Hamas’s operation to find them took far longer than the 72 hours initially promised, and the terrorists tried to deceive Israel by returning the bodies of several non-hostages. However, by early December, Hamas had returned the remains of all but one hostage, Ran Gvili.

Twenty-four-year-old police officer Ran Gvili had died as a hero. When he heard of Hamas’s invasion, he donned his uniform — despite awaiting surgery for a broken shoulder — rode a motorcycle to the frontline, and battled Hamas terrorists for hours at Kibbutz Alumim before he was killed. The terrorists then absconded with Gvili’s body to Gaza. Even in this action, the terrorists showed how little respect they had for human life, and how they were already calculating how they might use even the bodies of deceased Israelis as trophies or bargaining chips.

For years, Gvili’s body lay in Gaza. In the months after the final ceasefire, Hamas officials claimed they could not locate the body, while Israeli military and intelligence agencies had only unconfirmed rumors pointing to several locations, including cemeteries. Some of the locations, which lay on Hamas’s side of the ceasefire’s “yellow line,” were not searched by Israel.

However, Israeli forces recently scored a breakthrough with the capture last month of an Islamic Jihad operative “knowledgeable about the details of the burial location” of Gvili. During interrogation, the operative “described his involvement in transferring the body between several locations and also identified additional individuals who were aware of its whereabouts,” according to Israel’s Shin Bet security agency.

The operative’s information strengthened Israel’s confidence in an intelligence assessment that Gvili was buried in al-Batash Muslim cemetery in an eastern neighborhood of Gaza City, just on Israel’s side of the yellow line. They further verified the man’s story with information provided by Hamas through an intermediary.

Over the weekend, Israel launched an extensive search operation at the cemetery with numerous security forces, including some deployed on Hamas’s side of the yellow line, forensic experts, and 20 dentists.

Before Monday, Israel had exhumed 250 bodies in the cemetery to test their teeth for a match to Gvili. On Monday, the dentists finally found a body whose teeth matched Gvili’s dental records. Forensic experts then matched the body’s fingerprints and performed other tests to confirm Gvili’s identity.

This enabled Israel to finally bring the years-long hostage tragedy to an end. After 843 days, the body of the last Israeli hostage was coming home.

Even amid these glad tidings, it’s impossible to overstate just how inhumane the behavior of the Islamist terrorists was. On October 7, 2023, they killed a police officer in combat and carried his body back to Gaza. They then shuffled his corpse around between multiple locations until, presumably, they got tired of doing so. They buried the Jewish man’s body in a Muslim cemetery without marking his grave or informing his family. The jihadis in charge of Gvili’s body either never bothered to inform their supervisors, or those supervisors forgot about it. Thus, when the return of Gvili’s corpse became politically important — the only rational reason for stealing his corpse from Israel — the terrorists couldn’t even say where he had been buried.

In a marked contrast, Israel said they would rebury the exhumed bodies and clean up the cemetery out of respect for the dead. Israel will also hand over at least 15 bodies to Hamas’s Gaza Health Ministry. The current exchange rate for returning hostage bodies is 15:1, but Israel may return more Palestinian bodies, since they now have no more hostages to recover. As a country whose worldview is informed by the Genesis creation account, Israel shows respect for every human life.

The next step on Israel’s agenda is to make sure that another attack like October 7 can never happen again, and that entails disarming Hamas and removing it from power in Gaza. The return of the final hostage body marks the end of Phase One of Trump’s Gaza peace plan. White House officials said they expect Israel to help implement Phase Two, which involves Hamas’s disarmament and Gaza’s reconstruction.

However, the various parties have different views about which part of Phase Two takes priority. Hamas itself never agreed to the peace plan and will not consent to disarmament. But, for Israel, this is the priority. “Now we are focusing on completing the two remaining missions: dismantling Hamas’s weapons and demilitarizing Gaza of arms and tunnels,” declared Netanyahu. “I am already hearing the statements that we will allow Gaza’s reconstruction before demilitarization. That will not happen. I am hearing that we will bring Turkish soldiers and Qatari soldiers into Gaza. That too will not happen. I am hearing that I will allow the establishment of a Palestinian state in Gaza. That did not happen, and it will not happen.”

“Israel will maintain security control over the entire area from the Jordan River to the sea, and that applies to the Gaza Strip as well,” Netanyahu insisted.

That question is left for another day. For now, the focus is on Israel’s celebration at recovering the remains of the last hostage. Netanyahu praised the recovery as “an extraordinary achievement for the Israel Defense Forces, the State of Israel, the citizens of Israel, because you gave us the backing to complete the work.”

“We promised, and I promised, to bring everyone back, and we brought everyone back, to the very last one,” he said. “Rani is a hero of Israel. He went in first, he came out last. He came home.”