JERUSALEM — Hamas said it was committed to the US-brokered agreement that halted its war with Israel, and to returning all the bodies of hostages still unaccounted for under the ruins of Gaza.

Responding to a call from the militant group for assistance with locating the bodies of the 19 hostages, buried under the rubble alongside an untold number of Palestinians, Turkey sent specialists to help in the search.

Under a ceasefire agreement spearheaded by US President Donald Trump, Hamas returned 20 surviving hostages and the remains of nine of 28 known deceased hostages — along with another body, which Israel said was not that of a former hostage.

In exchange, Israel freed nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners from its jails and halted the military campaign that it launched in Gaza after Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reaffirmed yesterday his determination to “secure the return of all hostages” after his defence minister warned that the military “will resume fighting” if Hamas failed to do so.

Later that same day, Hamas insisted on “its commitment to the agreement and its implementation, including its keenness to hand over all remaining corpses”.

But it said the process “may require some time, as some of these corpses were buried in tunnels destroyed by the occupation, while others remain under the rubble of buildings it bombed and demolished”.

Turkey has deployed dozens of disaster relief specialists to help search for the bodies, but the families of the Israeli dead have fumed at Hamas’s inability to deliver their loved ones’ remains.

The main campaign group advocating for the hostages’ families demanded on that Israel “immediately halt the implementation of any further stages of the agreement as long as Hamas continues to blatantly violate its obligations”.