The United States agrees with Israel that the fight against Hamas will take months, but officials are discussing the timetable for scaling back from high-intensity combat to more precise ways of targeting the militant group’s leaders, a top U.S. envoy said Friday amid growing American unease about the mounting death toll in Gaza.
U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan planned to talk to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas later in the day about the besieged enclave’s postwar future, which, according to a senior U.S. official, could include bringing back Palestinian security forces driven from their jobs in Gaza by Hamas in its 2007 takeover.
Meanwhile the Israeli military announced Friday it had recovered the bodies of three hostages from Gaza — one civilian and two soldiers — two months after they were abducted from southern Israel by Hamas.
Special Forces troops found the body of dual Israeli-French national Elia Toledano in an operation in the strip and brought the body back to Israel, Israel Defense Forces said in a post on X.
The 28-year-old Tel Aviv resident was working as an event organizer at a music festival in Re’im, four miles from the Gaza border, when he was kidnapped by Hamas militants during the attacks of Oct. 7 and taken back to Gaza.
Toledano was abducted alongside friend and fellow French-Israeli Mia Schem, 21. She was released as part of a hostages-for-Palestinian prisoners swap during a weeklong truce between Israel and Hamas that collapsed Dec. 1.
The bodies of Israeli Cpl. Nik Beizer, 19, and Sgt. Ron Sherman, 19, also captured on Oct. 7 from a military police post near the Gaza border fence, were recovered during operational activity and returned to Israeli territory, IDF wrote on X.
Beizer and dual Israeli-Argentine national Sheman were seen alive in a video posted on social media by Hamas on Oct. 7.
Sending condolences to the victims’ families, the IDF pledged that finding and bringing the hostages back was its “national mission.”
“We are working together with security agencies, and with all intelligence and operational means, in order to return all of the hostages home,” the IDF said.
