The body of the young sergeant killed on October 7 2023 during the Hamas attack and then taken to Gaza was found more than two years later by the Israeli army. He was the last of the hostages still held in the Palestinian enclave. His disappearance had crystallized a national wait made of stubborn hope repeated prayers and suspended mourning that for a long time prevented Israeli society from turning the page of October 7.
Nothing however destined Ran Gvili to be at the heart of the fighting that day. Eight days before a motorcycle, his passion, accident had caused him a serious shoulder injury. On medical leave awaiting surgery he could have stayed away. But on the morning of October 7 when the first explosions rang out and images of armed men invading Sderot and the nearby kibbutzim filled the screens he did not hesitate. He put on his uniform without orders without obligation. To his worried father he reportedly replied that one does not abandon friends.
This almost instinctive gesture led him south where police officers and soldiers were trying in total confusion to contain the attack and rescue civilians trapped. His unit was initially supposed to join the area of the Nova festival where hundreds of young people fleeing gunfire had been hunted down and massacred. But the fighting blocked them at the entrance of Kibbutz Alumim in the Negev which had become a battlefield. With another officer Ran Gvili then went to a gas station where many survivors of the festival had taken refuge. Injured, terrified, some at the end of their strength they were evacuated one by one to safer areas. Nearly one hundred people may have been saved in this way.
Then came the distress call from colleagues who had remained near the kibbutz overwhelmed by Hamas fighters far more numerous and heavily armed. The Israeli army absent for many hours had still not arrived. The return toward Alumim took place under fire. Ran Gvili’s car was hit by gunfire then targeted by an anti-tank rocket. Wounded in the knee and the hand, isolated, he hid in the vegetation trying to stop his bleeding himself using only a simple tourniquet. Until the very end he resisted. According to testimonies collected after the fighting he faced several attackers alone firing until he used all of his ammunition before being defeated.
The song contained in his first name then fell silent. Not into oblivion but into an unbearable void. For days and then weeks the family remained without the slightest certainty. Ran was listed as missing. Then three weeks later the police announced that he had been taken to Gaza. On January 30 2024 he was officially declared killed in action without his body having been found. A death without burial prolonging the trauma well beyond October 7 and making Ran Gvili the symbol of a country still waiting for its missing.
It was only after long searches carried out by the Israeli army in a territory devastated by bombardments and fighting that his remains were located buried in a cemetery in northern Gaza among hundreds of other graves. With this return a particularly painful page closed for Israel for the first time in more than a decade no Israeli alive or dead remained a hostage in the Palestinian enclave.
Beyond the individual tragedy the return of Ran Gvili’s body is part of a major geopolitical sequence. The hostage issue long constituted the main political and diplomatic lock of the conflict triggered after October 7 2023 weighing even more heavily on Israeli society than the war itself. For nearly two years it structured weekly demonstrations fractured public debate and conditioned the strategic choices of the government far more than the human and military cost of the offensive carried out in Gaza.
The release of all captives became a condition set by Benjamin Netanyahu for any evolution of the ceasefire concluded in the autumn of 2025 under strong American pressure. Washington eager to close the most intense military phase of the conflict multiplied signs of impatience in order to open the way to a second stage of the plan carried by the Trump administration – the establishment of a Peace Council, the formation of a Palestinian technocratic government, the beginning of Hamas disarmament and a partial withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza.
In this context the discovery of Ran Gvili’s body removed the last symbolic and political obstacle. It allowed the Israeli executive to assert that none of its soldiers had been abandoned while giving the United States the necessary argument to accelerate the implementation of the diplomatic process. The controlled reopening of the Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt demanded by Washington and accepted by Tel Aviv fits directly into this dynamic.
For Hamas the gradual return of bodies also constituted a political lever displaying its capacity to respect the terms of the ceasefire despite Israeli accusations of bad faith and attempting to reposition itself as an unavoidable actor in any future Palestinian political architecture even weakened and contested.
Ran Gvili thus became much more than a name or a face. He embodies both the failure of a system, the collapse of collective protection on October 7 and individual commitment carried to the point of sacrifice. The paradox remains entire – a man whose first name evokes joy and movement carried into definitive stillness yet whose story continues to resonate in national memory.
During the military ceremony accompanying the transfer of his coffin to Tel Aviv covered with the Israeli flag his father stood there in silence hands resting on the wood. The country held its breath one last time. The song fell silent. The echo remains.
*Author is a former member of the UN senior staff