Hostage families call on UN to act to bring their loved ones’ bodies home

Hamas’s practice of holding bodies of hostages whom it killed is the “lowest form of terrorist, psychological warfare,” Ruby Chen, the father of Israeli-American hostage Itay Chen, told the UN Security Council.

The Thursday session, called at the request of the United States, focused on Resolution 2474, which addresses the return of the bodies of missing people held by hostile parties during armed conflict. It was the first such discussion since Oct. 7.

“I humbly ask the Security Council members, what kind of human being holds people for a decade and uses them as negotiation chips?” Chen told the council.

“Who denies the deceased the last basic human dignity they deserve?” he added.

Chen told the council that the Israel Defense Forces notified him in March 2024 that his son was declared dead, but the terror group has refused to confirm its possession of Itay’s remains or to provide any physical evidence for more than 19 months.

Leah Goldin, the mother of Hafar Goldin who was murdered and captured by Hamas on August 1, 2014, two hours into a UN and US-brokered ceasefire, also addressed the session.

[Missing Credit]Leah Goldin and Ambassador Danny Danon (Bianca Otero)

“For nearly 11 years, my son’s body has been held in Gaza by a terrorist organisation that exploits humanitarian frameworks for political gain, and for nearly 11 years, the international community has looked away,” Leah said during a press briefing preceding the Security Council session.

“What my family have been subjected to—this deliberate withholding of information about our sons fate and the refusal to return him, has been a form of slow and enduring psychological torture,” he told the council.

Danny Danon, the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, urged the Security Council to enforce Resolution 2474 and ensure the return of the deceased hostages.

“Hamas has turned the bodies of the murdered into an industry of death,” he said. “It uses them to negotiate, to bargain, to profit.”

“This is not a mistake, it is a strategy,” he said.

Danon called on the global body to appoint a special UN envoy to address the issue of returning the bodies of the kidnapped.

“The obligation to return the fallen is an ancient human conscience—not a political gift, not a Western norm, but a universal obligation,” he said. “In Judaism, Christianity and Islam, burying the dead is a sacred commandment.”