Last Monday, January 26, the body of 24-year-old police St.-Sgt.-Maj. Ran Gvili was retrieved by the IDF Alexandroni Brigade from a mass grave in the al-Batesh cemetery in Shejaia in the northern Gaza Strip.
It was, in fact, a rather extraordinary act, and had it not been approved and executed with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s full backing and blessing, it is doubtful whether Gvili would ever have been brought home.
Neither Hamas nor the Islamic Jihad would have been willing or able to go to the length that the Alexandroni Brigade went to.
Gvili’s family – who until the very end hoped that by some miracle he would return home walking on his two legs – received him in a coffin, wearing the same uniform he’d worn when he’d walked out of his home on the morning of October 7, 2023.
Gvili, one of the first Israelis who was abducted by Hamas or Islamic Jihad terrorists, was the last hostage to be released from the Gaza Strip 843 days later, which is why the saying “first to leave – last to return” has been attached to his name.
When he was abducted from Alumim, a religious kibbutz in the Gaza envelope, he was badly wounded and possibly already dead, but we do not know this for sure.
At least formally, Gvili’s return for burial in Meitar, where his family resides, closes the first stage of the Trump plan for a final settlement in the Gaza Strip and heralds the beginning of the second, rather problematic stage.
It is problematic in most Israeli eyes because it does not appear to solve any of the serious security problems that Israel faces from Gaza, nor does it promise to eliminate Hamas and replace it with an effective governing body.
Gvili was one of several dozen, or perhaps hundreds of soldiers, who, on October 7, put on their uniforms, and headed to the area of the Gaza envelope invaded by several thousand Hamas terrorists, well before they were formally called up for reserve duty.
Heroes on the frontlines: the first responders of October 7
A heterogeneous group of men – and some women as well – what one might call the “crème de la crème” of Israeli society (in Hebrew, melah ha’aretz, “salt of the earth”) were among the first to reach the embattled area, confront the invading terrorists, and try to save as many victims as possible, both in the invaded settlements and the attacked grounds around the Nova music festival.
This group included anonymous persons like Gvili and well-known major-generals, such as Yair Golan, Noam Tibon, and Israel Ziv. They fought for many hours before the government (including its head) and the organized armed forces got their wits and acts together.
Early on October 7, Gvili was at home, recovering from a fractured shoulder following a motorcycle accident.
He put on his police uniform, first drove to the outskirts of Alumim, then to the Nova festival, and finally back to Alumim, where he was fatally wounded, but not before killing (according to reports) at least 14 Palestinian terrorists.
We do not know for sure whether Gvili arrived in the Gaza Strip alive. His body was allegedly seen outside the Shifa hospital in Gaza City not long after his abduction.
There appears to have been no information after that about his whereabouts, until recently, when the IDF found out from an Islamic Jihad detainee the exact location of his body.
However, we know very little about how he came to be buried in a Palestinian mass grave in Shejaia, still dressed in his police uniform and physically whole (so his family was informed).
Before he was finally exhumed and identified on January 26, 250 unidentified Palestinian bodies were examined.
The identification was based primarily on Gvili’s teeth, performed by a dental rehabilitation expert from the Hadassah-University Medical Center, in military service.
The final identification was performed by the Abu Kabir Institute of Forensic Medicine in Tel Aviv.
Many had hoped that the final return of all the hostages, both alive and dead, would help bring about some form of closure and foster some urgently required unity in our torn society.
Certainly, there is no doubt that large sections of the Jewish population, from both sides of the political spectrum, rejoiced at Gvili’s return; his conduct on the last day of his life earned him the title of hero, and his story is one with which most of us can identify.
However, unfortunately, his return does not bring any closure to the whole disaster of October 7. Only the conclusions of a serious and neutral national commission of inquiry might achieve that.
Furthermore, many of us still feel that more could have been done by our government in general, and Netanyahu in particular, to bring back more of the 255 hostages alive.
The prime minister rejects this proposition, even though there is no doubt that the extreme right in his government openly rejected paying any sort of political price for the hostages’ release for ideological reasons – and at certain junctures he himself didn’t do his utmost to bypass its representatives.
Politics overshadow Gvili's return
Another issue that prevented Gvili’s return from becoming a unifying event was the fact that Netanyahu – apparently with the support of Gvili’s family – chose to turn the funeral, in its wider sense, into an event that glorified the coalition and left the opposition out.
In fact, it was the first time that Netanyahu turned up for the funeral of a dead hostage, and one wonders whether he would have done so if the Gvili family were, “heaven forbid,” liberal or left-wing.
The only leader of one of the opposition parties who attended the pre-burial part of the ceremony was MK Benny Gantz, who is currently playing a rather bizarre political survival ritual.
My feeling is that the rest of the Jewish opposition didn’t feel it would be welcome at the ceremony, which Netanyahu appears intent on harnessing to his rapidly evolving election campaign.
Nevertheless, strangely enough, US President Donald Trump seems to be trying to take all the credit for the hostages’ return, including Gvili, at the expense of former president Joe Biden (who was involved in returning most of the hostages after October 7) and even Netanyahu himself.
Hopefully, Gvili will be remembered for who he was: a hero deprived of the potential of living a full and fruitful life.
The writer has written journalistic and academic articles, as well as several books, on international relations, Zionism, Israeli politics, and parliamentarism. In the years 1994-2010, she worked in the Knesset Library and the Knesset Research and Information Center.