A Small Name Returned: Meny Godard and the Heavy Business of Remains
The coffin arrived like a punctuation mark — quiet, solemn, unavoidable. It was handed over in Gaza to the Israeli army and the Shin Bet, then taken north to Tel Aviv, where forensic experts began the work of turning bone and cloth back into a person with a life and a family. Israel has now confirmed that one of the last four hostages whose remains were returned is 73‑year‑old Meny Godard.
“We were told his identification has been completed,” a statement from the prime minister’s office said, and that is the merciless, bureaucratic language that sometimes must stand in for a family’s grief. In Tel Aviv, relatives braced themselves, not for the shock of a living body, but for the slow, private business of mourning someone whose fate had been decided far beyond their control.
“It’s impossible to describe this feeling,” said a neighbor who grew up with Godard in a small town outside the city. “You wait for a miracle and get a box. It doesn’t make sense. But at least now we know where he is. At least we can say goodbye properly.”
The corpse had been located in Khan Yunis in southern Gaza, Hamas said at the time of handover, and the transfer was part of the US-brokered ceasefire terms signed almost as much to stop the killing as to secure the return of the living and the dead. At the beginning of that truce, the armed wings of Hamas and Islamic Jihad reportedly held 20 living hostages and 28 bodies. Since then, all living captives have been released and, until this most recent transfer, 24 sets of remains were returned.
Numbers become a strange sort of empathy when stacked like this: 20 living, 28 dead; 24 returned, one more today. Israel has released nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners in exchange and returned the remains of hundreds of Palestinians killed during the conflict. These are not abstract figures. Each digit is a kitchen, a workplace, a synagogue or mosque, a photograph on a mantle.
Where bodies become bargaining chips
“This war has turned the most basic human rituals into currency,” said Dr. Leila Mansour, a scholar of conflict and memory. “The politics of bodies — who is allowed a proper burial, who is recognized as dead — this is a core part of the trauma that comes out of this war.” Her voice wavered between academic distance and a raw, human frustration. “When authorities negotiate over remains, the families end up caught between statecraft and mourning.”
For families, identification is a process of science and sorrow. For states and armed groups, the handover is one stage in a broader, often brutal calculus. Israel accuses Hamas of delay and obfuscation; Hamas answers that many bodies have been buried beneath two years of rubble and shifting lines of battle. The truth is both: war buries people twice, under debris and under layers of policy.
A brother of one captive, who asked not to be named, spoke of the moment the Red Cross handed over a single coffin. “I put my hand on the lid,” he said. “I thought of my mother—would she know how to accept this? We all want certainty. Even this limited closure is a small mercy.”
The Ceasefire, a Board of Peace, and Diplomatic Tightropes
Beyond the immediate grief, the handover of remains is tied to an ambitious diplomatic project that will now take center stage at the United Nations Security Council. The United States has pushed a draft resolution that goes far beyond the mechanics of returning bodies: it seeks to plant a new institutional apparatus over Gaza, endorsing what proponents call a transitional “Board of Peace” and authorizing an international stabilization force to help secure borders and decommission weapons.
The text — a third draft seen by diplomats — imagines a Board of Peace that would oversee Gaza until the end of 2027. It even tentatively gestures toward a future Palestinian state, on the condition that the Palestinian Authority enact reforms and reconstruction of Gaza proceeds. The U.S. framed the proposal as “a historic moment” to pave the way for peace; officials warned that hesitation could have “grave” consequences for civilians in Gaza.
“There’s a hunger for security and governance after years of war,” said a Western diplomat involved in the talks. “But people underestimate how hard it is to translate a resolution on paper into trust on the ground.”
The draft also proposes a temporary International Stabilisation Force (ISF) that would operate with Israel, Egypt, and newly trained Palestinian police. Its mandate would include protecting civilians, securing humanitarian corridors, and the “permanent decommissioning of weapons from non-state armed groups.” At the same time, diplomats are pushing back, asking who will oversee the overseers. The draft lacks a clear Security Council oversight mechanism; it leaves the future role of the Palestinian Authority murky and fails to fully map out the ISF’s chain of command and rules of engagement.
“We’re trying to build a peace architecture on still-shifting sand,” commented Rasha Qasim, a Gaza reconstruction specialist. “If people on the ground — the families, the local councils, even the fighters—see this as an external imposition, it won’t last. You need local legitimacy as well as international muscle.”
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, speaking from Canada, expressed optimism that the resolution would be adopted. Yet optimism in diplomacy sometimes masks the deeper mistrust that lingers between actors whose interests diverge. Many Palestinians see the Trump-era proposal — and any body of oversight associated with it — as another chapter in external decisions made about their land and lives, not with them.
Numbers, rituals, and the human cost
- Hostages at start of truce: 20 living, 28 dead
- Remains returned so far (before this latest transfer): 24
- Prisoners released by Israel: nearly 2,000
When the diplomatic negotiations spill into the territory of the dead, the conversation becomes cruelly practical: which bodies are handed over first, who determines identity, how long does DNA testing take, who pays for repatriation? Each procedural decision contains an ethical weight.
And yet, in the communities touched by loss, rituals stubbornly persist. In Tel Aviv and in the villages outside Gaza, candles are lit; in Gaza, people still visit graves, leave stones and photographs. These small acts resist the violence that tried to strip away names.
What do we ask of diplomacy in moments like this? Is it enough to secure the return of a body, or must diplomacy do more — create conditions so such returns become unnecessary? Is peace the absence of blood, or the presence of institutions that respect the dead and protect the living?
Those questions will be argued not only in New York and Washington but in kitchen tables, in funeral homes, and in the narrow alleys of Gaza where people have kept living despite everything. For now, a 73‑year‑old man has been named; his family can begin the long, private work of remembrance. The larger, public work of turning fragile ceasefire into lasting safety remains, painfully, unfinished.
