The Hostages and Missing Families Forum has demanded an urgent meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to push for a plan to ensure the remains of the 13 hostages still held in Gaza are brought home for burial, the forum announced in a statement on Tuesday.
The forum cited Hamas's numerous ceasefire violations, as well as "despicable actions, cynical manipulation of the hostages, and deception of the Red Cross."
"Hamas's repeated violations and the IDF's documentation prove what we have known and stated clearly and unequivocally: Hamas knows the location of the hostages and continues to act with contempt, deceiving the United States and mediators while dishonoring our loved ones," the forum wrote.
The family of IDF Lt. Hadar Goldin, whose remains have been held by Hamas in Gaza since 2014, also called out Hamas's continued violation of US President Donald Trump's agreement. "This is an act of terror that Hamas is personally and deliberately committing against US President Donald Trump," their statement read.
"We are confident that President Trump will respond in an appropriate manner, especially considering his ultimatum to Hamas. Not only did it fail to fulfill its commitment, but it also attempted to humiliate the world's most powerful person."
The family concluded by calling on Netanyahu to respond appropriately as well, and that in the past eleven years, Israel has still not learned from past mistakes.
Ministers call on Netanyahu to respond
Israel's ministers called on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to convene an urgent cabinet meeting on Tuesday and dismantle Hamas after it returned the remains belonging to a hostage who had already been buried in Israel, and not any of the 13 deceased hostages who had remained in Gaza.
It is planned for Netanyahu to convene a meeting on Tuesday to discuss Israel's response to Hamas's violation of the ceasefire-hostage deal. Sanctions imposed in response may include barring Hamas from entering the buffer zone.
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich penned a letter to Netanyahu to convene the narrowed security cabinet immediately “to discuss and formulate a robust and determined package of responses."
He also called for the meeting "to ensure our adherence to the war’s central objective of destroying Hamas and removing the threat emanating from Gaza toward the citizens of Israel.”
'We cannot allow Hamas to mock the citizens of Israel'
“We cannot allow Hamas to mock the citizens of Israel and to cynically and cruelly toy with the feelings of the families of the hostages and the fallen,” he added in the letter.
National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir called on Netanyahu not to extract a price from Hamas, but rather “destroy it completely.”
“The fact that Hamas continues to play games and does not immediately hand over all of our fallen bodies, in itself, shows that the terrorist organization is still standing on its feet. It’s time to break those legs once and for all,” he added.
“Right now, we don’t need to ‘extract a price from Hamas’ for the violations. We need to extract its very existence from it, and destroy it completely, once and for all, in accordance with the central objective defined for the War of Resistance,” Ben-Gvir stated.
Amichai Stein contributed to this report.