Bodies

Nov. 2 (UPI) — Israel has received the bodies of three more captives from Hamas and taken them to the National Institute for Forensic Medicine to be examined and identified, the Israeli Defense Forces said Sunday.

The IDF said in a statement that the bodies were presented by Hamas in three caskets to the International Committee of the Red Cross, which collected them and delivered them to Israeli soldiers inside Gaza. The bodies were then escorted across the border into Israel.

“The IDF urges the public to act with sensitivity and wait for official identification, which will first be communicated to the families of the deceased hostages,” the IDF said.

Hamas’ Al-Qassam Brigades said Saturday that it was ready to exhume the bodies of the three captives from inside the yellow line and had offered to hand them over to Israel.

Since entering a ceasefire with Hamas in October, Israel has carried out multiple operations beyond the yellow line, which marks the boundaries for Israeli troop deployment under the deal, shooting and bombing Palestinians in areas outside Israeli control.

Hamas has considered these to be violations of the ceasefire agreement.

On Friday, Hamas had returned the partial remains of three people, but Israel said that forensic testing revealed that the bodies did not belong to any of the Israeli captives.

The United Nations agency for Palestinian affairs said Sunday that it continues to operate health facilities in Gaza, with work including the screening of young children for malnutrition.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said Sunday that he had spoken with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in which they agreed that “humanitarian aid must reach the people of Gaza safely and in sufficient quantities.”

Meanwhile, the family of a Palestinian held captive by Israel for 27 years said he faced a severe health decline, Al-Jazeera reported.

He was arrested in April 1997 and received multiple life sentences.

Palestinian media also reported Sunday that Israeli forces continued to raid several areas across the occupied West Bank, detaining a child in Tubas, as Israeli settlers plowed through Palestinian land in the town of Idhna in preparation to seize and annex it.

Like a teenager armed with their first smartphone, President Trump’s masked immigration enforcers love nothing more than to mug for friendly cameras.

They gladly invite pseudo-filmmakers — some federal government workers, others conservative influencers or pro-Trump reporters — to embed during raids so they can capture every tamale lady agents slam onto the sidewalk, every protester they pelt with pepper balls, every tear gas canister used to clear away pesky activists. From that mayhem comes slickly produced videos that buttress the Trump administration’s claim that everyone involved in the push to boot illegal immigrants from the U.S. is a hero worthy of cinematic love.

But not everything that Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Border Patrol and its sister agencies do shows up in their approved rivers of reels.

Their propagandists aren’t highlighting the story of Jaime Alanís García, a Mexican farmworker who fell 30 feet to his death in Camarillo this summer while trying to escape one of the largest immigration raids in Southern California in decades.

They’re not making videos about 39-year-old Ismael Ayala-Uribe, an Orange County resident who moved to this country from Mexico as a 4-year-old and died in a Victorville hospital in September after spending weeks in ICE custody complaining about his health.

They’re not addressing how ICE raids led to the deaths of Josué Castro Rivera and Carlos Roberto Montoya, Central American nationals run over and killed by highway traffic in Virginia and Monrovia while fleeing in terror. Or what happened to Silverio Villegas González, shot dead in his car as he tried to speed away from two ICE agents in suburban Chicago.

Those men are just some of the 20-plus people who have died in 2025 while caught up in ICE’s machine — the deadliest year for the agency in two decades, per NPR.

Publicly, the Department of Homeland Security has described those incidents as “tragic” while assigning blame to everything but itself. For instance, a Homeland Security official told the Associated Press that Castro Rivera’s death was “a direct result of every politician, activist and reporter who continue to spread propaganda and misinformation about ICE’s mission and ways to avoid detention” — whatever the hell that means.

An ICE spokesperson asked for more time to respond to my request for comment, said “Thank you Sir” when I extended my deadline, then never got back to me. Whatever the response would’ve been, Trump’s deportation Leviathan looks like it’s about to get deadlier.

As reported by my colleagues Andrea Castillo and Rachel Uranga, his administration plans to get rid of more than half of ICE’s field office directors due to grumblings from the White House that the deportations that have swamped large swaths of the United States all year haven’t happened faster and in larger numbers.

Asked for comment, Tricia McLaughlin, Homeland Security assistant secretary for public affairs, described The Times’ questions as “sensationalism” and added “only the media would describe standard agency personnel changes as a ‘massive shakeup.’”

Agents are becoming more brazen as more of them get hired thanks to billions of dollars in new funds. In Oakland, one fired a chemical round into the face of a Christian pastor from just feet away. In Santa Ana, another pulled a gun from his waistband and pointed it at activists who had been trailing him from a distance in their car. In the Chicago area, a woman claimed a group of them fired pepper balls at her car even though her two young children were inside.

La migra knows they can act with impunity because they have the full-throated backing of the White House. Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller crowed on Fox News recently, “To all ICE officers: You have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties.”

That’s not actually true, but when have facts mattered to this presidency if it gets in the way of its apocalyptic goals?

Greg Bovino, El Centro Border Patrol sector chief, center, walks with federal agents near an ICE detention facility in Broadview, Ill.

(Erin Hooley / Associated Press)

Tasked with turning up the terror dial to 11 is Gregory Bovino, a longtime Border Patrol sector chief based out of El Centro, Calif., who started the year with a raid in Kern County so egregious that a federal judge slammed it as agents “walk[ing] up to people with brown skin and say[ing], ‘Give me your papers.’” A federal judge ordered him to check in with her every day for the foreseeable future after the Border Patrol tear-gassed a neighborhood in a Chicago suburb that was about to host its annual Halloween children’s parade (an appeals court has temporarily blocked the move).

Bovino now reports directly to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and is expected to pick most of the ICE field office directors from Customs and Border Protection, the arm of the federal government that the Border Patrol belongs to. It logged 180 immigrant deaths under its purview for the 2023 fiscal year, the last year for which stats are publicly available and the third straight year that the number had increased.

To put someone like Bovino in charge of executing Trump’s deportation plans is like gifting a gas refinery to an arsonist.

He’s constantly trying to channel the conquering ethos of Wild West, complete with a strutting posse of agents — some with cowboy hats — following him everywhere, white horses trailed by American flags for photo ops and constant shout-outs to “Ma and Pa America” when speaking to the media. When asked by a CBS News reporter recently when his self-titled “Mean Green Machine” would end its Chicago campaign — one that has seen armed troops march through downtown and man boats on the Chicago River like they were patrolling Baghdad — Bovino replied, “When all the illegal aliens [self-deport] and/or we arrest ‘em all.”

Such scorched-earth jibber-jabber underlines a deportation policy under which the possibility of death for those it pursues is baked into its foundation. ICE plans to hire dozens of healthcare workers — doctors, nurses, psychiatrists — in anticipation of Trump’s plans to build more detention camps, many slated for inhospitable locations like the so-called Alligator Alcatraz camp in the Florida Everglades. That was announced to the world on social media with an AI-generated image of grinning alligators wearing MAGA caps — as if the White House was salivating at the prospect of desperate people trying to escape only to find certain carnage.

In his CBS News interview, Bovino described the force his team has used in Chicago — where someone was shot and killed, a pastors got hit with pepper balls from high above and the sound of windshields broken by immigration agents looking to snatch someone from their cars is now part of the Windy City’s soundtrack — as “exemplary.” The Border Patrol’s peewee Patton added he felt his guys used “the least amount of force necessary to accomplish the mission. If someone strays into a pepper ball, then that’s on them.”

One shudders to think what Bovino thinks is excessive for la migra. With his powers now radically expanded, we’re about to find out.

The Palestinian group Hamas has handed over two bodies it said were of deceased Israeli captives, a day after the fragile Gaza ceasefire was shattered by a series of deadly Israeli strikes across the besieged enclave.

The office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Thursday that the two bodies had been received by Israeli forces via the Red Cross in Gaza and would be transported into Israel for identification.

Under the US-brokered accord to halt Israel’s two-year war on Gaza, Hamas released 20 living captives in exchange for Israel releasing nearly 2,000 Palestinian political prisoners. Israeli forces have also completed a partial withdrawal from urban centres in Gaza.

But since the ceasefire took effect on October 10, Israeli attacks have killed dozens of Palestinians across the enclave. From Tuesday into Wednesday, the Health Ministry in Gaza said Israeli attacks killed 104 people, including 46 children and 20 women.

As part of the agreement, Hamas committed to returning the remains of all 28 captives, in exchange for the bodies of Palestinians killed in the war. By Thursday, it had handed over 15 sets of remains, saying it continues to press for proper equipment and support to comb through vast mounds of rubble and debris — where thousands of Palestinians killed in Israeli bombardments are still buried.

Israel claims Hamas has been too slow to hand over the remaining bodies of Israeli captives still in Gaza.

Reporting from az-Zuwayda in central Gaza, Al Jazeera’s Tareq Abu Azzoum said Hamas is still facing “logistical and operational challenges regarding the retrieval of the bodies, specifically in areas that have been impacted by the Israeli bombardment”.

“Hamas has been calling for the entry of heavy bulldozers and machines in order to facilitate the process of recovering bodies. But on the ground, Israel is still accusing Hamas of deliberately procrastinating the release of the bodies,” Abu Azzoum said.

The dispute over the recovery and handover of bodies has been one of the difficulties complicating US President Donald Trump’s plan to end the war for good.

Numerous major obstacles still lie ahead, including the future administration of Gaza and the demand for Hamas to disarm.

‘Essential role of NGOs’

Earlier, witnesses said Israeli planes carried out 10 air strikes in areas east of Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, and tanks shelled areas east of Gaza City in the north before dawn.

The Israeli military said it carried out “precise” strikes against “terrorist infrastructure that posed a threat to the troops” in the areas of Gaza where its forces are still present.

Meanwhile, a UN official said more than 24,000 tonnes of UN aid have reached Gaza since the start of a ceasefire, while calling for NGOs to be allowed to assist in its distribution.

While aid volumes are significantly up compared with the period before the ceasefire, humanitarians still face funding shortfalls, the UN says, as well as issues coordinating with Israeli authorities, which are continuing to seal vital border crossings.

The World Food Programme’s Middle East Regional Director Samer Abdel Jaber said in 20 days of scale-up following the ceasefire, they “have collected about 20,000 metric tons of food inside Gaza”.

“The implementation of the 20-point [ceasefire] plan remains to be the central point and the central condition for us to be able to deliver humanitarian assistance in a holistic manner,” Alakbarov said.

He called on Israel to allow more NGOs to participate in the delivery of aid in Gaza, which Israel has banned.

“The persisting issue of registration of NGOs remains to be a bottleneck issue. We continue to emphasise the essential role of NGOs and national NGOs, which they play in humanitarian operations in Gaza, and we have escalated this now,” he said.

Israel’s assault has displaced most of Gaza’s more than two million people, many of them several times. The majority haven’t yet returned to their ravaged neighbourhoods, fearing they could soon be displaced once again or killed by Israeli forces.

Sources told Al Jazeera that the Israeli army carried out home demolitions east of the Tuffah and Shujayea neighbourhoods in eastern Gaza City on Thursday.

Israel has been demolishing homes since the start of its renewed ground incursion in the area earlier this month, part of what residents describe as a systematic campaign to clear large swaths of residential blocks.

Entire streets have been levelled, with bulldozers flattening homes and infrastructure as Israeli forces push deeper into Gaza City’s eastern districts.

Aid organisations fear that far fewer people than hoped have been able to leave the besieged Darfur city.

Those who have fled the western city of el-Fasher in wartorn Sudan are recounting scenes of horrific violence at the hands of the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) as aid workers say they fear only a fraction of the besieged city’s residents have managed to escape.

The RSF has killed at least 1,500 people in el-Fasher, capital of North Darfur state, since seizing it Sunday – including at least 460 at a hospital in a widely-condemned massacre.

More than 36,000 people have fled since Saturday, largely on foot, to Tawila, a town around 70 kilometres (43 miles) west that is already sheltering roughly 650,000 displaced people.

Hayat, a mother of five children, told the AFP news agency via satellite phone that seven RSF fighters ransacked her home, searched her undergarments and killed her 16-year-old son in front of her.

As she fled with neighbours, “we saw many dead bodies lying on the ground and wounded people left behind in the open because their families couldn’t carry them,” she recalled.

Another survivor named Hussein was wounded by shelling but made it to Tawila with the help of a family carrying their mother on a donkey cart.

“The situation in El-Fasher is so terrible — dead bodies in the streets, and no one to bury them,” he said. We’re grateful we made it here, even if we only have the clothes we were wearing.”

Aisha Ismael, another displaced person from el-Fasher recounted to The Associated Press news agency: “Shelling and drones (attacks) were happening all the time. They hit us with the back of the rifles day and night unless we hid in the houses. At 3 in the morning we sneaked outside the houses till we arrived Hillat Alsheth (area in north Darfur) where we were looted. They left us with nothing, I came here barefoot, even my shoes were taken.”

But aid workers in Tawila say they’re still waiting for most of el-Fasher’s supposed evacuees.

Mathilde Vu, advocacy manager for the Norwegian Refugee Council, which manages the Tawila camp, told the Associated Press “the number of people who made it to Tawila is very small”.

“Where are the others?” she said. “That tells the horror of the journey.”

The United Nations moved to approve a $20 million allocation for Sudan from the Central Emergency Response Fund to help scale up response efforts in Tawila and elsewhere in Darfur, UN Secretary-General spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said Wednesday.

The UN was “horrified” by the slaughter of more than 450 people at Saudi Hospital, where patients, health workers and residents had sought shelter, Dujarric added.

Elderly people, the wounded and those with disabilities remained “stranded and unable to flee the area”, he said.

Shayna Lewis, a Sudan specialist, told Al Jazeera the massacre of civilians was “most devastating because we in civil society have been warning the international community for over a year about the atrocity risks for the civilian population of North Darfur”.

For 18 months before Sudan’s army withdrew from the city, an RSF siege had trapped hundreds of thousands of people trapped inside without food or essentials.

What’s most “astonishing”, Lewis added, was the ability to see the bloodshed from outer space: Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab (HRL) reported satellite imagery shows clusters of objects consistent with human bodies and large areas of red discolouration on the ground.

Dozens of Palestinian bodies have been retrieved from mass graves near al-Shifa Hospital, buried almost a year ago after Israeli forces withdrew from the area. Hani Mahmoud explains how families and aid workers are struggling to identify the victims.

Palestinians returning to their homes in Gaza are facing danger from unexploded ordnance, with at least 53 people killed and hundreds injured by explosives.

Israeli restrictions on the entry of heavy machinery are crippling Gaza City’s efforts to clear debris and rebuild critical infrastructure, the city’s mayor says, as tens of thousands of tonnes of unexploded Israeli bombs threaten lives across the Gaza Strip.

In a Sunday news conference, Mayor Yahya al-Sarraj said Gaza City requires at least 250 heavy vehicles and 1,000 tonnes of cement to maintain water networks and construct wells.

Al Jazeera’s Hind Khoudary, reporting from az-Zawayda in Gaza, said only six trucks had entered the territory.

At least 9,000 Palestinians remain buried under the rubble. But the new equipment is being prioritised for recovering the remains of Israeli captives, rather than assisting Palestinians in locating their loved ones still trapped beneath rubble.

“Palestinians say they know there won’t be any developments in the ceasefire until the bodies of all the Israeli captives are returned,” Khoudary said.

Footage circulating on social media showed Red Cross vehicles arriving after meetings with Hamas’s armed wing, the Qassam Brigades, to guide them to the location of an Israeli captive in southern Rafah.

An Israeli government spokesperson said that to search for captives’ remains, the Red Cross and Egyptian teams have been permitted beyond the ceasefire’s “yellow line”, which allows Israel to retain control over 58 percent of the besieged enclave.

Al Jazeera’s Nour Odeh, reporting from Amman, said Israel spent two weeks insisting that Hamas knew the locations of all the captives’ bodies.

“Two weeks into that, Israel has now allowed Egyptian teams and heavy machinery to enter the Gaza Strip to assist in the mammoth task of removing debris, of trying to get to the tunnels or underneath the homes or structures that the captives were held in and killed in,” she said.

Odeh added that Hamas had been unable to access a tunnel for two weeks due to the damage caused by Israeli bombing. “That change of policy is coming without explanation from Israel,” she said, noting that the Red Cross and Hamas have also been allowed to help locate potential burial sites under the rubble.

Netanyahu: ‘We control Gaza’

Meanwhile, on Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sought to reassert political authority at home, saying that Israel controls which foreign forces may operate in Gaza.

“We control our own security, and we have made clear to international forces that Israel will decide which forces are unacceptable to us – and that is how we act and will continue to act,” he said. “This is, of course, accepted by the United States, as its most senior representatives expressed in recent days.”

Odeh explained that Netanyahu’s statements are intended to reassure the far-right base in Israel, which thinks he’s no longer calling the shots.

Those currently overseeing the ceasefire do not appear to be Israeli soldiers or army leadership, she explained, with Washington “requesting that Israel notify it ahead of time of any attack that Israel might be planning to conduct inside Gaza”.

Odeh noted that Israel’s insistence on controlling which foreign actors operate in Gaza – combined with the limited access for reconstruction – underscores a broader strategy to maintain political support at home.

Unexploded bombs a threat

Reconstruction in Gaza faces further obstacles from unexploded ordnance. Nicholas Torbet, Middle East director at HALO Trust in the United Kingdom, said Gaza is “essentially one giant city” where every part has been struck by explosives.

“Some munitions are designed to linger, but what we’re concerned about in Gaza is ordnance that is expected to explode upon impact but hasn’t,” he told Al Jazeera.

Torbet said clearing explosives is slowing the reconstruction process. His teams plan to work directly within communities to safely remove bombs rather than marking off large areas indefinitely. “The best way to dispose of a bomb is to use a small amount of explosives to blow it up,” he explained.

Torbet added that the necessary equipment is relatively simple and can be transported in small vehicles or by hand, and progress is beginning to take place.

The scale of explosives dropped by Israel has left Gaza littered with deadly remnants.

Mahmoud Basal, a spokesperson for the Palestinian Civil Defence, told Al Jazeera that Israel dropped at least 200,000 tonnes of explosives on the territory, with roughly 70,000 tonnes failing to detonate.

Children have been particularly affected, often mistaking bombs for toys. Al Jazeera’s Ibrahim al-Khalili reported the case of seven-year-old Yahya Shorbasi and his sister Nabila, who were playing outside when they found what appeared to be a toy.

“They found a regular children’s toy – just an ordinary one. The girl was holding it. Then the boy took it and started tapping it with a coin. Suddenly, we heard the sound of an explosion. It went off in their hands,” their mother Latifa Shorbasi told Al Jazeera.

Yahya’s right arm had to be amputated, while Nabila remains in intensive care.

Dr Harriet, an emergency doctor at al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, described the situation as “a public health catastrophe waiting to unfold”. She said children are being injured by items that look harmless – toys, cans, or debris – but are actually live explosives.

United Nations Mine Action Service head Luke David Irving said 328 people have already been killed or injured by unexploded ordnance since October 2023.

Tens of thousands of tonnes of bombs, including landmines, mortar rounds, and large bombs capable of flattening concrete buildings, remain buried across Gaza. Basal said clearing the explosives could take years and require millions of dollars.

For Palestinians, the situation is a race against time. Al Jazeera’s Khoudary said civilians are pressing for faster progress: “They want reconstruction, they want freedom of movement, and they want to see and feel that the ceasefire is going to make it.”

Israel and Hamas have exchanged the remains of more captives, but the Palestinian group says Israel is failing to uphold the terms of the Gaza ceasefire agreement by refusing to reopen the crucial Rafah border crossing with Egypt.

The bodies of two more Israeli captives, one soldier and one civilian, were returned to Israel late on Tuesday, and identified early on Wednesday as those of Aryeh Zalmanovich, 85, and army Master Sergeant Tamir Adar, 38.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) had earlier received the bodies in Gaza, in a handover organised by the Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas.

The Israeli military said that Zalmanovich died in captivity in Gaza on November 17, 2023, and that Adar was killed in fighting in southern Israel on October 7, 2023, and his body was taken back to the Palestinian territory.

Hamas has now handed over the bodies of 15 Israeli captives as part of the ceasefire agreement with Israel.

An estimated 13 more sets of remains are expected to be returned to Israel, although Hamas has said the widespread devastation in the Palestinian territory and the Israeli military’s continuing control of certain parts of Gaza have slowed the recovery of the bodies.

The Palestinian group also released 20 living captives in one day at the start of the ceasefire.

Earlier on Tuesday, the bodies of 15 Palestinians killed in Israeli detention were returned to Gaza, where they were taken to the Nasser Medical Complex for identification, according to a medical source.

Under the ceasefire agreement, Israel released some 2,000 living Palestinian detainees from Israeli prisons, and has committed to releasing the remains of 360 more deceased Palestinians.

A forensics team that received the bodies of some 45 Palestinians returned by Israel last week said that some arrived still shackled and bearing signs of physical abuse and possible execution.

Ubai Al-Aboudi, the executive director of the Bisan Center for Research and Development, said that Palestinians imprisoned by Israel should also be considered to be “hostages”.

“This entire system dehumanises Palestinians,” Al-Aboudi told Al Jazeera from Ramallah, adding, “when we talk about Palestinian prisoners, we are actually talking about hostages”.

Al-Aboudi noted that about 20 percent of the Palestinian population has been arrested or detained by Israel over the decades, and that the situation in Israeli prisons has deteriorated dramatically since the war on Gaza began in October 2023.

“Most of them are held without any due process, without being charged, and just based on military orders by a foreign military occupation,” he said.

Rafah crossing still closed

A delegation of Hamas officials, attending talks with Turkish officials in Qatar on Tuesday, said that the Palestinian group remains committed to the ceasefire deal despite Israel’s “repeated violations”.

Israel is delaying the implementation of the ceasefire by failing to open the Rafah crossing “for the travel of sick and injured people, and its prevention of the entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza”, the Hamas officials said in a statement.

Mujahid Muhammad Darwish, head of the Hamas delegation, also highlighted “the inalienable rights of our people to self-determination and their right to an independent state with Jerusalem as its capital”.

Turkiye was among the signatories of US President Donald Trump’s document on the Gaza ceasefire deal earlier this month in Egypt’s Sharm el-Sheikh.

The Rafah crossing has remained closed since May 7, 2024, when it was seized by Israeli forces as they invaded the city of Rafah in the Gaza Strip’s south, where close to one million people were sheltering at the time.

The United Nations has described the crossing, which connects the Palestinian territory to Egypt, as one of two “arteries” for humanitarian access.

The UN’s highest court, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), ordered Israel to reopen the Rafah crossing on May 24, 2024, following an emergency submission from South Africa, but the crossing has remained closed, with only limited access via the adjacent Karem Abu Salem crossing.

Residents of Rafah were only able to return to the destroyed city after a temporary ceasefire began on January 19, 2025, which also saw the Rafah crossing temporarily reopen to allow medical evacuations in February, before Israel issued new forced evacuation orders for Rafah at the end of March.

The crossing has remained closed for humanitarian aid access since May 2024.

Hamas has turned over the remains of two more deceased Israeli captives from Gaza, the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has announced, as the Palestinian group accused Israel of continuing to commit ceasefire violations and repudiating the commitments made to peace mediators.

“Israel has received, via the Red Cross, the bodies of two hostages”, which were returned to Israeli security forces in Gaza, Netanyahu’s office said in a post on the X social media platform early on Sunday.

The prime minister’s office said the families of the Israeli captives have been updated on the return of the remains, although no names have been released so far.

The office said the two bodies have been transferred to the Israeli National Centre of Forensic Medicine, and “upon completion of the identification process, formal notification will be delivered to the families”.

“The effort to return our hostages is ongoing and will not cease until the last hostage is returned,” the prime minister’s office added.

With the handover late on Saturday, Hamas has now returned the remains of 12 of the 28 captives who died in Gaza, a key demand by Israel in the week-old ceasefire deal to end the two-year war.

According to the deal, Hamas was to return all of the Israeli captives – both the living and the dead – within 72 hours of its signing. In exchange, Israel was to release 360 bodies of deceased Palestinians and some 2,000 prisoners.

Hamas has said the widespread devastation in the Palestinian territory and the Israeli military’s continuing control of certain parts of Gaza have slowed the recovery of the bodies of deceased captives.

Al Jazeera’s Hani Mahmoud, reporting from Gaza City, said Palestinian authorities do not have adequate equipment to help with the search for captives’ bodies beneath the rubble of destroyed buildings.

“It’s very difficult, with recovery teams on the ground facing extraordinary challenges. [They have] no bulldozers, no trucks, no cranes and no heavy equipment… to speed up the process and help with the recovery and return of bodies,” Mahmoud said.

Al Jazeera’s Hamdah Salhut, who is reporting from Amman, Jordan, because Al Jazeera is banned from Israel and the occupied West Bank, said that Netanyahu’s government has known “for some time” that the recovery of bodies of captives would be “an incredibly difficult and daunting task”.

Netanyahu, however, has accused Hamas of not doing enough to return the remains of the 28 and that all of the bodies need to be returned immediately, Salhut said.

“Until that happens, that’s when Israel is going to honour more of the commitments of the ceasefire, like letting in more humanitarian assistance, talking about opening the Rafah border crossing,” she said.

For days, Hamas and Israel have traded blame over violations of the US-mediated ceasefire.

On Saturday, Hamas accused the Netanyahu government of “fabricating flimsy pretexts” to not follow through on its commitments to the peace deal, as well as denouncing Israel’s refusal to open the Rafah crossing with Egypt as “a blatant violation” of the agreement.

On Friday, Israeli forces killed 11 members of a single family, including seven children, in an attack east of Gaza City.

The Palestinian Embassy in Egypt announced earlier on Saturday that the Rafah crossing, the main gateway for people in Gaza to leave and enter the enclave, would reopen on Monday.

But Netanyahu said the border crossing would remain closed until Hamas hands over the bodies of all the deceased Israeli captives.

The delivery of humanitarian aid into Gaza also remains slow despite the ceasefire deal.

On Saturday, the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, said it had enough humanitarian food supplies to feed Gaza for three months, but trucks carrying the life-saving cargo are unable to enter Gaza and are stuck in warehouses in Jordan and Egypt.

“We must be allowed to get all this aid into Gaza without delay,” UNRWA said, adding that it also has equipment to provide shelter to as many as 1.3 million people.

Israel says Hamas is failing to meet commitments under Trump’s Gaza ceasefire plan, while Hamas says Israel’s destruction makes recovering captives’ bodies nearly impossible. With 11,000 Palestinians also still under rubble, Al Jazeera’s Nour Odeh says tensions threaten the fragile truce.

“They’re digging.” US President Donald Trump appeared to acknowledge Hamas’s struggle to recover Israeli captives’ bodies from beneath Gaza’s ruins. Israel says it will not move to the next phase of the Gaza peace plan until Hamas returns the remains of all 28 captives.

Health officials in Gaza say many of the 90 returned bodies bore marks of violence and possible executions.

Gaza’s Ministry of Health says it has received the remains of 45 Palestinians who were held in Israeli custody via the International Committee of the Red Cross, bringing the total number of bodies returned to 90 as part of a United States-brokered ceasefire deal.

Medical teams are continuing to examine, document and prepare the bodies for delivery to families “in line with approved medical procedures and protocols”, the Health Ministry said in a statement on Wednesday.

Under a ceasefire deal backed by US President Donald Trump and aimed at ending the two-year Gaza war, Israel was to turn over the bodies of 15 Palestinians for every deceased Israeli returned. The remains of 45 people were returned on Monday.

Palestinians awaited information about the bodies that arrived at Nasser Hospital on Tuesday and Wednesday. The forensics team described disturbing conditions, bearing signs of physical abuse.

Some of the Palestinian bodies were blindfolded and handcuffed, indicating “field executions” may have taken place, medical sources told Al Jazeera.

Israel is expected to hand over more bodies, though officials have not said how many are in its custody or how many will be returned. It remains unclear whether the bodies were dug up from cemeteries by the Israeli army during its ground offensive or if they belong to detainees who were killed during the Israeli assault. Throughout the war, Israel’s military has exhumed bodies as part of its search for the remains of captives.

As forensic teams examined the first remains returned, the Health Ministry on Wednesday released images of 32 unidentified bodies to help families recognise missing relatives.

Many appeared decomposed or burned. Some were missing limbs or teeth, while others were coated in sand and dust. Health officials have said Israeli restrictions on allowing DNA testing equipment into Gaza have often forced morgues to rely on physical features and clothing for identification.

The forensics team that received the bodies said some arrived still shackled or bearing signs of physical abuse.

“There are signs of torture and executions,” Sameh Hamad, a member of a commission tasked with receiving the bodies at Nasser Hospital, said.

The bodies belonged to men aged 25 to 70. Most had bands on their necks, including one who had a rope around his neck. Most of the bodies wore civilian clothing, but some were in uniforms, suggesting they were Palestinian fighters.

Hamad said the Red Cross provided names for only three of the dead, leaving many families uncertain of their relatives’ fate.

Israel’s war on Gaza has killed nearly 68,000 Palestinians since October 2023, according to the Health Ministry. Palestinian officials say the true toll could be far higher, with tens of thousands of bodies believed to be under the rubble.

Thousands more people are missing, according to the Red Cross and Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics.

Rasmiya Qudeih, 52, waited outside Nasser Hospital, hoping her son would be among the 45 bodies transferred from Israel on Wednesday.

He vanished on October 7, 2023, the day of the Hamas-led attack. She was told he was killed by an Israeli strike.

“God willing, he will be with the bodies,” she said.

The Health Ministry released a video showing medical workers examining the bodies, saying the remains would be returned to families or buried if left unidentified.

Rights groups and a United Nations Commission of Inquiry have accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza, and South Africa has filed a case alleging Israel committed genocide at the International Court of Justice. Israel denies the accusations.

Israel continues to restrict aid entering Gaza, saying Hamas has not met its end of deal to release all bodies of captives.

Handover comes as Trump says Hamas must disarm or be disarmed, ‘perhaps violently’.

All hell will break loose in bombshell scenes as Robert Sugden goes above and beyond to save his ex-husband Aaron Dingle from John Sugden’s grasp – but things will go awry.

Two lives are left hanging in the balance next week and it may mean trouble for Robert Sugden as he’s left to grapple alone with the aftermath.

Ryan Hawley’s Robert Sugden goes all out to protect his ex-husband Aaron Dingle from John Sugden’s clutches in Emmerdale – even if it means putting himself back on the firing line.

“His suspicions are renewed when he hears Tracy talking to Charity,” says Ryan. “She says there’s something more going on. He then finds out that Aaron and John are away at this cottage. He’s worried about Aaron, who’s in danger. That’s his primary focus.”

Aaron (Danny Miller) has been torn between love and loyalty in recent months. John (Oliver Farnworth) offered him security but Robert’s return to the village reopened old wounds – and old passions.

But from the moment he met his half-brother John, Robert sensed trouble. “He thinks there are too many things that don’t add up,” Ryan says, “He’s always had the suspicion there’s something wrong about John.”

John, who has blood on his hands from Nate’s death and Mackenzie’s disappearance, knows Robert is circling. To keep his crimes under wraps, he isolates Aaron and tightens his grip.

But when Robert tracks them down with help from Eric Pollard, the façade breaks wide open. Robert accuses John of murder, triggering an explosive confrontation.

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“He suspects that John is to blame for Nate’s murder,” Ryan says. “Robert gets banged out in one go. He’s not very good at fighting.” The drama escalates in the woods, as Robert regains consciousness and gives chase. Paranoia then collides with betrayal. “John instantly thinks that Aaron’s been lying to him,” Ryan says.

“He knows that Aaron and Robert have had an affair so he instantly suspects there’s more betrayal. Then John comes up with his own survival instinct plan.”

That plan turns deadly. As truths about Nate and Mackenzie emerge, John drags Aaron into his spiral – literally. In a shock move, John pulls Aaron with him down a gorge, leaving Robert horrified.

“There’s so much going on,” Ryan says, “They’re on the edge of a cliff, there’s a revelation about Mack and another about Nate. It’s a very perplexing situation. He approaches the gorge and looks over. And he sees two lifeless-looking bodies at the bottom.”

But the nightmare doesn’t stop there. For Robert, who only walked free on parole in May after serving time for Lee Posner’s murder, the fallout could be catastrophic.

“I don’t think he realises at that moment,” Ryan says. “It’s only later in the hospital that people start accusing him.” Could the accusations send Robert straight back to prison?

Behind the scenes, the intense stunt work tested everyone involved. Filming the gorge scenes took a gruelling three days. But Ryan reveled in the challenge. “It’s fun to see people do cool things and make the scenes look great,” he says.

For Ryan, who returned to Emmerdale after six years of absence, this storyline has been worth the wait. “I’m very much enjoying it,” he says, “I get to work with everyone.”

And while Robert’s future hangs by a fragile thread, John’s fate seems much darker. “It’s a great climax, a great ending to the story of this serial killer,” he says, “I read every single scene in it all the way through. I loved it.” Are the walls finally closing in on John?

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A SUSPECT has been arrested in connection with four bodies which were found mysteriously floating in the River Seine in Paris last week.

It comes after a horrified train passenger spotted a corpse in the water before police rushed to the scene and found another three bodies.

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A 24-year-old Algerian man has now been taken into custody and accused of committing several murders.

The bodies were found in the French capital on August 13 in Choisy-le-Roi.

One of the victims died from strangulation while another had suffered “violent injuries”, the local prosecutor said on Saturday.

It is currently unclear how many of the four victims the man is accused of killing.

The first body which was reportedly submerged for a shorter time than the others was identified as a man aged around 40 who lived in the local area.

More to follow… For the latest news on this story, keep checking back at The U.S. Sun, your go-to destination for the best celebrity news, sports news, real-life stories, jaw-dropping pictures, and must-see videos.

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Aug. 11 (UPI) — Authorities in South Carolina are investigating the “suspicious” deaths of two women as homicides after their bodies were found in rural woods about 116 miles from Charleston, where they lived.

On Friday afternoon, the remains were found in Rembert, which is 41 miles east of Columbia, the Sumter County Sheriff’s Office said in a news release. Rembert has a population of only 242 with 42,330 residents in the county.

“We have begun our investigation, and we will have to wait until we have the results of the autopsies to know more,” Sheriff Anthony Dennis said at the scene Friday. “In the meantime, we cannot speculate. At this time, we can only say we are investigating these deaths as suspicious.”

Dennis said a person discovered the bodies and met the deputies when they arrived.

The coroner’s office said that the deaths would be investigated as homicides, according to information obtained by ABC News and The State newspaper. They were identified as Christine Marie McAbee, 35, and Kristen Grissom, 38, and they were from Charleston.

Autopsies will be performed on Tuesday in Charleston, the coroner said.

Coroner Robert Baker didn’t disclose how long the women had been dead or whether they were killed in the woods.

It’s been seven months since I looked up from my desk here in The Times’ El Segundo office and saw smoke roiling over the horizon.

The sky behind the billowing dove-gray clouds was still blue and clear. Across the county, people who would not live to see the next sunrise still watered their plants and chatted with neighbors and went about their business. I snapped a photo of the Palisades fire, unaware that I was looking at an entity already in the process of changing Los Angeles irrevocably.

The Eaton fire erupted hours later. By the following afternoon there was no distinction between smoke and sky, just that acrid, asphyxiating gray that made eyes water and chests tighten throughout Los Angeles County.

For days, we breathed in each other’s lives. Flames took the contents of our homes — photographs, plastic toys, car batteries, attic insulation, every coat of paint and varnish applied across the decades — and reduced them to microscopic particles that wafted across the region, went into our windpipes, leached into our blood and settled in our brains.

At work I wrote obituaries, sorted through the medical examiner’s database, and listened to grieving people describe their loved ones’ finest qualities and heartbreaking final hours.

A total of 31 people died as a direct result of injuries sustained in the Palisades and Eaton fires. The remains of the last known victim, 74-year-old Juan Francisco Espinoza, were discovered just weeks ago in the wreckage of his Altadena home.

Smoke from the Palisades fire, seen from the window of the L.A. Times’ office in El Segundo, on Jan. 7.

(Corinne Purtill / Los Angeles Times)

The disaster’s true toll is likely far higher. Just this week, a research team compared the number of deaths Los Angeles County logged between Jan. 5 and Feb. 1 to those counted in previous, non-pandemic years. This year’s count was much higher than expected. Researchers estimate that the fires led to the deaths of an additional 440 people in January alone, through interrupted healthcare and hazardous air quality.

It’s the beginning of a long reckoning with the potential health consequences of the toxic pollutants that the fires unleashed into our air, soil and water.

It will almost certainly be impossible to attribute any individual case of cancer, dementia or cardiovascular failure — to name a few of the health issues associated with exposure to wildfire smoke — to a person’s proximity to the L.A. fires.

Similarly, it’s impossible to pinpoint the degree to which climate change exacerbates any individual natural disaster. But it’s highly likely that a chaotic climate contributed to the intensity of January’s firestorms.

Two extraordinarily wet years produced an explosion of vegetation that dried out over an unusually warm summer and unusually dry winter. The region was a tinderbox, and when the Santa Ana winds hit with the force of a hurricane, ignitions turned quickly into uncontrolled catastrophes.

In the last decade, wildfires have unleashed enough fine particulate pollution to reverse years’ worth of hard-won improvements under the Clean Air Act and other antipollution measures.

These itty-bitty particles of soot, measuring 2.5 microns or less in diameter, are fine enough to cross the barriers between the outer branches of our lungs and the blood, and the blood and the brain.

Such particles can originate from vehicle exhaust, construction projects, campfires and even volcanic eruptions. But wildfires are a particularly insidious source.

Compared with other sources, wildfire smoke “contains a higher fraction of ultrafine particles — particles 25 times smaller than PM2.5 — that can move directly from the nose into the brain, potentially damaging brain cells and eventually leading to dementia,” said Joan Casey, an environmental epidemiologist at the University of Washington.

“The other thing that differs is how people are exposed to wildfire smoke. Unlike other sources of PM2.5, [in which] exposure might be relatively constant throughout the year, people are often exposed to a few days of extreme wildfire smoke annually,” Casey said. “Think about it this way: it might be fine to drink one glass of wine per day, but some of these wildfire smoke events are like drinking four bottles of wine in an evening, which can overwhelm the body’s defense and harm health.”

That punch may land particularly heavy when the smoke comes from urban fires like January’s disaster.

Casey pointed to a paper that came out earlier this year looking at the relative toxicity of different types of wildfire smoke.

That research team found that smoke originating from fires that burned buildings had higher concentrations of lead, nickel and other carcinogenic substances than smoke from fires that burned primarily organic material.

After examining air pollution data captured at 700 air quality monitors over a 15 year-period, the researchers found that the share of pollutants that could be attributed to wildfire “significantly increased over time,” they wrote, “with wildfire-attributed concentrations of multiple carcinogenic metals significantly higher by the end of our sample.”

The team estimated that exposure to wildfire smoke may have caused 47 additional cases of cancer in the U.S. between 2006 and 2020 that would not have otherwise developed.

Momentous as a cancer diagnosis is for any individual, in the context of the national population this is a minuscule and statistically insignificant increase in context, they pointed out — there are more than 1 million new cancer diagnoses in the U.S. per year.

But most of that wildfire smoke was generated by “traditional” wildfires that mostly burn trees, brush and plants. We don’t know what the burden will be from increasing exposure to incinerated batteries, machinery, plastic and cars, said Emma Krasovich Southworth, a doctoral candidate at Stanford and co-author of the study.

“Given that we’re seeing more urban fires . . . we would expect that this risk to public health could change,” she said. “Even though [wildfire smoke] hasn’t added a significant cancer burden in the past, that’s not to say it won’t in the future.”

As anyone affected by January’s fires in any capacity knows, disasters of this magnitude also create an enormous amount of acute and chronic stress, which itself alters brain structure and function.

In a paper exploring the potential health effects of the fires, Casey and colleagues noted multiple ways that the upheaval and displacement they caused could contribute to ongoing mental health issues.

“Those evacuating face extreme stress and impacts on mental health, even years after the events,” they wrote. “Even when homes are not damaged or destroyed, evacuation disrupts multiple dimensions of people’s lives, including work, education, community gatherings, and health care access.”

This column looks often at the economic costs and consequences of a changing climate. There is also a toll our brains and bodies, a physical burden we all take on when the environment falls apart.

L.A.’s fires have reshaped the city. It is also possible that they have triggered changes in our very cells whose consequences we can’t yet see, and will become apparent to us long after the last lot has been cleared.

“I think [the fires have] the potential to be devastating to human health, especially over the long term,” Krasovich Southworth said. “We might see the immediate uptick of certain things that we know happen when exposed to [fire], like asthma or other respiratory issues. But I think the longer-term exposures to these chemicals . . . could be really devastating to the community.”

This is the latest edition of Boiling Point, a newsletter about climate change and the environment in the American West. Sign up here to get it in your inbox. And listen to our Boiling Point podcast here.

July 7 (UPI) — Authorities in northern California have confirmed the recovery of the bodies of seven people who had been reported missing following last week’s explosion of a warehouse storing fireworks near Sacramento.

“In accordance with standard procedure and out of respect for the families, the identities of the deceased will be withheld until formal identification is complete and next of kin have been notified,” Yolo County said in a statement Sunday.

The fireworks warehouse, located near County Roads 23 and 86A in the Esparto area of Yolo County, exploded Tuesday at about 5:50 p.m. following a fire that erupted on the compound.

The cause of the fire remains under investigation.

On Sunday, authorities executed a controlled explosion at the site “to safely remove hazardous materials identified at the scene,” Yolo County said in a statement.

The explosion was scheduled to occur between 2:30 and 3:30 p.m. PDT.

“Residents may hear loud noises or notice smoke and odors in the area during this time,” the county said. “This is expected and part of the controlled process … There is no immediate threat to public safety, and all necessary safety protocols are in place.”

Authorities had confirmed on Friday that remains of at least some of the seven people reported unaccounted for had been found.

The fire and the ensuing explosion resulted in the Oakdale Fire, which burned 78 acres before it was 100% contained on Sunday, according to Cal Fire.