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Units from Egyptian authorities and the International Committee of the Red Cross have been authorized to locate the bodies of hostages who perished taken during the 7 October attacks, Israeli authorities have verified.

The authorities in Israel stated that the teams have been permitted to operate past the referred to as "yellow line" in the region under the control of military personnel in Gaza.

The group has transferred fifteen out of twenty-eight deceased Israeli hostages under the initial stage of a American-mediated ceasefire deal, which requires it to hand over all hostage bodies. The group stated it is now coordinating with Egyptian authorities.

Donald Trump has cautions Hamas to start return the bodies "promptly, or the additional nations involved in this great peace will intervene".

An official representative indicated the crew from Egypt has been authorized to collaborate with the Red Cross to find the remains, and would use digging equipment and trucks for the operation past the "demarcation line".

The "demarcation line" indicates the boundary running along the north, south and east of the Gaza territory that Israel withdrew to, as part of the first stage of the truce agreement.

Until now, Israel has not authorized the entry of such teams.

Egypt, along with Qatari officials and Turkish authorities, is a key signatory of the mediated by Trump peace initiative for Gaza, which was ratified in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh in recent weeks.

The news will be greeted positively by relatives, desperate to give them a dignified funeral.

The International Committee of the Red Cross has already been heavily involved in the return of hostages.

The organization does not hand over its captives - alive or deceased - directly to the IDF, but instead to the ICRC, which in turn escorts them through the territory and transfers them to the Israeli military.

But the arrival of digging crews from Egypt inside the Gaza Strip is a recent development.

After more than 24 months of heavy shelling by Israel, the United Nations calculates that as much as 84% of the area has been reduced to rubble.

Hamas says it is doing its best to retrieve hostage bodies, but it encounters challenges locating them under rubble of buildings destroyed by the IDF in Gaza.

It is now working in coordination with the Egyptian authorities.

On the weekend, an official representative said that Hamas knew where the bodies were.

"If the group put in greater work, they would be able to recover the bodies of our captives," the representative said.

The former president shared on his Truth Social platform on Saturday that measures would be taken if the bodies of the hostages who died were not handed back quickly.

"A portion of the bodies are hard to reach, but others they can hand over now and, for unknown reasons, they are not. Perhaps it has do with their disarming," he said.

He continued: "Let's see what they do over the next 48 hours. I am monitoring the situation very closely."

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On the weekend, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced the country would determine which foreign forces it would permit as part of a proposed multinational contingent in the region to help maintain the ceasefire under the former president's initiative.

"We are in command of our security, and we have also made it clear regarding foreign troops that we will determine which units are unacceptable to us, and this is how we function and will proceed," he declared talking at the beginning of a cabinet meeting.

On the end of the week, the American diplomat indicated "a lot of nations" had offered to be involved in the force - but added Israeli authorities would have to be comfortable with participants.

This seemed like a reference to the Turkish government, amid accounts Israel had rejected the nation's involvement.

It was still uncertain, however, how such a force could be deployed without an understanding with Hamas.

Israel initiated a armed operation in the territory in following the 7 October 2023 attack, in which militants associated with the group took the lives of about 1,200 individuals and took two hundred fifty-one additional persons as captives.

No fewer than sixty-eight thousand five hundred nineteen have been killed in Israeli attacks in Gaza since then, according to the territory's Hamas-run health ministry.