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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned that the war in Gaza would not be over until Hamas was disarmed and the Palestinian territory demilitarised.
His declaration came as Hamas’s armed wing, the Ezzedine Al-Qassam Brigades, handed over the remains of two further hostages on Saturday night (local time) under a US-brokered ceasefire agreement.
The Israeli military said late Saturday that a Red Cross team received the remains of two hostages and the coffins were on their way to its security forces in Gaza.

Prime Minister Netanyahu emphasized the importance of completing the second phase of the ceasefire to bring an end to the conflict.

He said late Saturday that “Phase B also involves the disarming of Hamas and the demilitarisation of the Gaza Strip.
“When that is successfully completed — hopefully in an easy way, but if not, in a hard way — then the war will end,” he added in an appearance on right-wing Israeli Channel 14.

However, Hamas has been reluctant to agree, and during the lull in hostilities, it has worked to reestablish its dominance in the Gaza Strip.

The organization has expressed a need for both time and technical support to retrieve bodies that it claims are still trapped beneath the debris in Gaza.

In a subsequent move, Netanyahu’s office announced that the Rafah border crossing would remain closed indefinitely.

The two bodies to be returned on Saturday “were recovered earlier today”, the al-Qassam Brigades said on Telegram.
Netanyahu on Saturday hinted that the reopening of the vital Rafah crossing to Egypt could depend on Hamas returning all the bodies of hostages still in Gaza.
The Palestinian mission in Cairo announced that the crossing could open as early as Monday, though only for Gazans living in Egypt who wished to return to the territory.

Shortly after, however, Netanyahu’s office said he had “directed that the Rafah crossing remain closed until further notice”.

“Its reopening will be considered based on how Hamas fulfils its part in returning the hostages and the bodies of the deceased, and in implementing the agreed-upon framework,” it said, referring to the week-old ceasefire deal.
Hamas warned late Saturday that the closure of the Rafah crossing would cause “significant delays in the retrieval and transfer of remains”.
While the Rafah crossing has yet to reopen just over a week since the brokering of the truce, hundreds of trucks are rolling in each day via Israeli checkpoints and aid is being distributed.

Around 560 metric tons of food had entered Gaza per day on average since the truce, but this was still well below the scale of need, according to the UN World Food Programme.

11 Palestinians killed in Israeli fire

Some violence has persisted despite the ceasefire.
Gaza’s civil defence agency said on Saturday that it had recovered the bodies of nine Palestinians — two men, three women and four children — from the Shaaban family after Israeli troops fired two tank shells at a bus.
Two more victims were blown apart in the blast and their remains have yet to be recovered, it said.

At Gaza City’s Al-Ahli Hospital, the victims were laid out in white shrouds as their relatives mourned.

“My daughter, her children and her husband; my son, his children and his wife were killed. What did they do wrong?” demanded grandmother Umm Mohammed Shaaban.
The military said it had fired on a vehicle that approached the so-called “yellow line” — which has no physical markings — to which its forces withdrew under the terms of the ceasefire, and gave no estimate of casualties.
“The troops fired warning shots toward the suspicious vehicle, but the vehicle continued to approach the troops in a way that caused an imminent threat to them,” the military said.
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