Israel receives body of one of the last four Hamas hostages

Israel today received the body of one of the last four hostages held in the Gaza Strip by Hamas and its allied militias, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office announced. This is Israeli Meni Godard, who died during the Hamas attack in southern Israel on October 7, 2023, when he was 73 years old, said the same source.

“At the end of the identification process by the Legal Medical Institute (…) representatives (of the army) informed Meni Godard’s family that their relative had been repatriated to Israel,” the prime minister’s office said in a statement. Meni Godard was killed at his home on kibbutz Beeri, in the company of his 63-year-old wife Ayelet Godard.

He was quickly identified as a hostage, but nothing more was known until the Israeli Army announced in February 2024 that he had died on the day of the attack. His wife’s body was found and identified in the kibbutz – an Israeli collective agrarian community. The couple had four children and six grandchildren. As part of the ceasefire agreement that came into force on October 10, Hamas released 20 hostages and promised to return the bodies of another 28 people.