Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has laid out a new political framework for the war in Gaza by linking the completion of the return of all hostages to a transition to what he described as the next phase.
In a speech delivered at the Knesset, on the sidelines of a visit by Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama, Netanyahu said that “Israel has brought back all of its hostages, and today it has returned the last of them.” This, he said, opens the door to a phase whose priority he defined as “disarming Hamas and the complete demilitarization of the Gaza Strip,” with an explicit emphasis that “the next phase is not a reconstruction phase.”
With this framing, Netanyahu sought to entrench a strict Israeli definition of the next phase—one centered on dismantling military capabilities in Gaza before any civil or economic discussion, and on accelerating the implementation of this phase as a gateway to completing the objectives of the war. This means that closing the hostage file does not signal the end of the confrontation, but rather its redirection toward a different trajectory.
This political declaration was grounded in a field development announced by the Israeli military hours earlier. In an official statement, the army confirmed the recovery of the body of police officer Ran Goyli, who was killed during the October 7 attack and whose remains had been held in the Gaza Strip. According to the statement, “the operation to return all hostages … from the Gaza Strip to the territory of the State of Israel has been completed,” marking a first since 2014, with no Israeli hostages remaining inside the enclave.
The military said the recovery of the final body followed a military, security, and intelligence effort that lasted 843 days and involved field units and multiple agencies. The development closed one of the files that had accompanied the war since its outset and provided the practical foundation for the political transition Netanyahu described.
However, the circumstances surrounding the discovery of the body quickly became a point of contention between competing narratives. A spokesperson for the Al-Quds Brigades claimed that the factions had provided mediators with the coordinates of the body’s location three weeks earlier, accusing Israel of delaying the search.
By contrast, an Israeli military official told Alhurra that the body was recovered as part of a special military operation dubbed “Brave Heart,” carried out by Southern Command forces in cooperation with the elite Yahalom engineering unit at a cemetery in the Shuja’iyya neighborhood, where more than 250 bodies were examined before the remains were identified and retrieved.
According to the source, the operation was “the product of an intelligence effort that lasted more than two years and was considered one of the central objectives of Military Intelligence,” relying on the collection and analysis of information from multiple sources. This, the source said, allowed the search area to be narrowed from hundreds of potential graves to a limited number within a short time frame.
As Israel maintained this account, the debate shifted to the international dimension. According to the Israeli Public Broadcasting Corporation, U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner arrived in Israel late last week amid progress toward the second phase of the plan led by U.S. President Donald Trump. The visit included meetings with the prime minister and Israeli officials and focused on arrangements for the “day after” in Gaza.
According to the broadcaster, the American envoys discussed opening the Rafah crossing in both directions, along with potential international frameworks for administering the territory. The visit preceded the announcement of the recovery of the final body and had at the time drawn criticism from the Goyli family, who demanded that efforts be focused first on retrieving the hostage before any discussion of reconstruction or future arrangements.
Domestically, this track has not produced consensus within Israel. Transportation Minister and member of the security cabinet Miri Regev presented a vision linking any transition to the next phase to full Israeli security control over border crossings, with all entry and exit movements placed under the direct authority of the military and the Shin Bet. Under her proposal, the crossings would be opened primarily for the exit of civilians and under strict supervision.
She also stressed her opposition to the presence of Turkish or Qatari forces inside the Gaza Strip, even if they were to participate as part of any international framework. More hardline positions have emerged within the cabinet.
National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir argued that opening the Rafah crossing at this stage would be “a major mistake and a very bad message,” warning that any relief measures or civilian arrangements implemented before the complete dismantling of Hamas could be interpreted as a retreat from the war’s objectives.
In sum, closing the hostage file for the first time in more than a decade has not ended the debate inside Israel, but rather elevated it to a new level. Between Netanyahu’s declaration of a new phase, U.S. pressure to advance the second stage, and internal disagreements over border crossings and Gaza’s future governance, the war is entering a more complex political track—while the “day after” in the enclave remains open to competing and unresolved scenarios.
The article is a translation of the original Arabic.
