A Coffin, A Crossroads: What One Returned Body Reveals About Gaza’s Fragile Ceasefire
The metal hum of the Red Cross convoy was the kind of sound that makes you hold your breath — not from expectation, but from a weary, brittle hope.
Late one evening, under the blurred orange of floodlights and the salt-sour smell of the Mediterranean wind, a coffin believed to hold a hostage’s remains was handed over in Gaza. The International Committee of the Red Cross took custody of it and began the slow, careful work of moving it to Israeli army hands, according to an Israeli military statement. For families on both sides of this conflict, a single coffin can be a doorway to grief and to the complicated logistics of truth and closure.
Small gestures under enormous strain
“We were told to be ready,” said a woman who described herself as an aunt of a missing person, voice trembling over the phone. “All week my brother kept waking and asking if the phone had rung. When it did at night, it felt like a blow and a balm at once.”
The handover is one small, bruised part of a larger pause: a US-brokered ceasefire, negotiated with Egypt, Qatar and Turkey, has largely halted major fighting. It has also exposed how fragile a pause can be when the work of burying the dead, identifying bodies and returning loved ones collides with politics, engineering and the wreckage of war.
Counting the missing and the dead
Numbers keep a rough ledger of what has happened — and what remains unresolved. Israel says it has received nine of 28 bodies that Hamas had held in Gaza. Earlier in the week, 20 living hostages taken during Hamas’s 7 October 2023 assault were returned. But dozens more remain unaccounted for, and families wait on every detail with a patience worn thin.
On the Gaza side, the Hamas-run health ministry has tallied at least 67,967 deaths since the war began — a figure the United Nations considers credible, though it does not distinguish between civilians and fighters. International agencies warn that more than half of the victims are women and children. These are not abstract numbers: they are a litany of funerals, of emptied chairs at tables, of schools converted into mass graves and hospitals reduced to triage tents.
“We are burying the past and the present at once”
“We are burying the past and the present at once,” said a 43-year-old community nurse in Gaza City, who asked not to be named for safety reasons. “Every day we are called to identify bodies under rubble. Sometimes all we can do is record a name.” Her voice was flat but not defeated — more like someone who has become fluent in sorrow.
Hamas has said it is committed to handing over all remaining bodies but has also appealed for heavy machinery to speed searches of rubble where people may be entombed. “We need diggers, excavators, cranes,” an unnamed Hamas official told mediators. “There are areas of collapse only machines can reach.” Israel, stressing that militants know where bodies are located, warned that time is limited.
Humanitarian supply lines — progress and limits
The temporary lull in fighting has opened a narrow window for aid. The UN World Food Programme has been averaging about 560 tonnes of food into Gaza per day since the ceasefire began — a substantial increase from zero convoys, but still far short of estimated needs. With famine conditions present in parts of Gaza, UN officials have repeatedly said that aid flows must scale up to thousands of trucks each week to avert mass starvation.
“We are not where we need to be,” said Abeer Etefa, a WFP spokesperson, at a Geneva briefing, noting that logistics remain nightmarish. Only 57 trucks reached southern and central Gaza one recent day — a “breakthrough,” she said — but the target is 80–100 trucks daily, and northern Gaza remains grimly inaccessible because of closed crossings and damaged roads.
Hospitals are collapsing under the strain. The World Health Organization has warned that infectious diseases are running rampant and that only 13 of Gaza’s 36 hospitals are even partially operational. “Whether meningitis, diarrhoea, respiratory illnesses — we’re talking about a mammoth amount of work,” Hanan Balkhy of WHO told AFP. In such conditions, the vacuum of governance and services becomes a conveyor belt toward more death.
Politics and accountability: The ICC and the shadow of warrants
In another corner of international law, the International Criminal Court has become a lightning rod. The court rejected Israel’s request to appeal arrest warrants issued for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant, a decision that ricocheted through diplomatic channels. In November, judges found “reasonable grounds” to believe the officials bore responsibility for crimes in Gaza — a finding that inflamed passions in Israel and in parts of the United States.
“This is not about politics; it is about the rule of law,” said a human rights lawyer in The Hague, who asked to remain anonymous. “If accountability is negotiable, we have a problem.” Meanwhile, Israel and allied governments have contested the court’s jurisdiction and its authority to issue such warrants — underscoring how legal processes and battlefield realities now intersect in ways that will shape the region for years.
What comes next: borders, governance, and an international force?
Ceasefires are fragile by nature, and the plan being advanced includes not just pauses in shooting, but the heavy-lift tasks of reopening crossings, disarming militants, and rebuilding a devastated territory. Mediators and Western governments are already discussing an international stabilisation force to help hold the peace. France and Britain, coordinating with the United States, are pushing for a UN Security Council resolution to provide a legal basis for such a mission — one that would likely borrow from precedents like Haiti and permit “all necessary measures” to fulfil its mandate.
Potential contributors include Indonesia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Qatar and others, with Indonesia’s president even signalling a willingness to deploy tens of thousands of troops if called upon, under a UN mandate. Yet any stabilisation mission will face an immediate dilemma: security without legitimacy is empty, and operations in a place scarred by decades of distrust require more than soldiers — they require credibility, resources, and a plan for governance, reconstruction and reconciliation.
Questions for the world — and for ourselves
Who cares for the living when so many of the dead still need names? Can an international force help stitch together security and humanitarian relief without becoming another foreign presence that people resent? And perhaps most urgently: how do we turn the logistics of aid and the mechanics of law into something that feels human again?
When I asked a father in Kfar Saba, where a recently returned body was buried, what he wanted most now, he said simply: “A grave with a stone that says his name. Let him not be a number.” That single sentence carries the weight of an entire people’s yearning — for dignity, for acknowledgement, for the quiet rituals that let us grieve and begin to reckon with what was lost.
These are not just questions for leaders in capitals or judges in far-off courtrooms. They are questions for anyone who watches the news and wonders what our obligations are to strangers whose lives now intersect with ours through images, headlines and, sometimes, through a shared humanity that surfaces, startling and plain: we can count the bodies, but can we also count the ways we are responsible?
As convoys roll and diplomats draw maps of futures yet to be built, a coffin moves slowly across a checkpoint. It is a small act in the scale of geopolitics, and a monumental one in the life of a family. It is a reminder that amidst negotiations, legal rulings and military postures, the human story — grief, memory, and the desire for closure — remains stubbornly, urgently central.
