Remains of Israel’s Most Famous Spy May Return Home Soon After Gaza Hostages

The body of Israel’s most famous spy — hanged in Syria 60 years ago — may be returning home not long after the 48 hostages held by Hamas at Gaza are handed over as early as Monday morning, Israel time.A Hamas official told Al Jazeera on Sunday that the living hostages have all been counted and transported to three locations where Red Cross vehicles will meet them to return them to Israel. Israel’s coordinator for the hostages and missing persons, Gal Hirsch, said “6 or 7 a.m.” Israeli time on Monday is “realistic” for the hostage release to begin.Vice President Vance added Sunday that “knock on wood” the hostages “should be at home in the next 24 hours.” “We’ve been told to expect them by tomorrow Israel time, which of course, would be early morning here in the United States,” Mr. Vance told Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures.” “It’s a great morning. It’s a big deal for the country and just a great credit to the president and the entire team so we’re very excited about it.”President Trump is expected to arrive in Israel early on Monday, where he will address the Knesset and possibly greet some of the released hostages.Once all the hostages are back on Israeli soil, Israel will release hundreds of Palestinian prisoners serving life sentences as well as 1,700 detainees, along with the bodies of 300 Palestinian fighters. After that, negotiators will move to the next steps in the president’s 20-point peace plan, including what self-governance without Hamas may look like for Palestinians in Gaza. Much of that picture could depend on Saudi Arabia, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said Sunday, calling normalization of ties between the Saudis and Israel dependent on “a solid plan to allow the Palestinians to have an independent sovereign nation that doesn’t threaten Israel.”“Borders will have to change. It won’t be a state, it will be more like an emirate; it will probably be a protectorate of Saudi Arabia,” he said on “Meet the Press,” adding that any attempts to annex the West Bank would “blow all this up.”Hezbollah must also never be allowed to resurrect, Mr. Graham said. “Hezbollah will do the same thing in the future to blow this up as Hamas did in the past. So you’ve got to keep Iran in the box,” he said.As the negotiations proceed, a Saudi state-run news agency, Al-Hadath, reported on Sunday that Cohen’s body could be handed over by Syrian officials soon. Eli Cohen. Photo: State of IsraelCohen, a Mossad agent who was able to penetrate the highest echelons of the Ba’ath party’s military leadership in 1965 before being caught and executed, is widely credited for contributing to Israel’s rapid defeat of Syria, Egypt, and Lebanon in the 1967 Six-Day War. His story was told in a 2019 Netflix series called “The Spy,” starring Sacha Baron Cohen, who is unrelated to Eli Cohen.Cohen’s widow, Nadia Cohen, had been petitioning international authorities and the Syrian government run by dictators Hafez and Bashar al-Assad for decades to have his remains returned. In May, 60 years after Cohen was hanged in Damascus Square, Israeli agents conducted a special operation to retrieve 2,500 items that belonged to Cohen from the safes of Syrian intelligence, including letters he had written to his family, documents and photographs from his operations, and personal items. “Eli is an Israeli legend. He’s the greatest agent Israeli intelligence has had in the years the state existed. There was no one like him,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said at the time.

Remains of Israel’s Most Famous Spy May Return Home Soon After Gaza Hostages

Remains of Israel’s Most Famous Spy May Return Home Soon After Gaza Hostages

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