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Units from Egypt and the ICRC have been granted permission to locate the remains of deceased hostages taken during the October 7th incidents, officials in Israel have verified.

The Israeli government announced that the crews have been permitted to search beyond the referred to as "demarcation line" in the region controlled by Israeli forces in Gaza.

The group has handed over fifteen out of twenty-eight deceased Israeli hostages under the first phase of a American-mediated truce agreement, which requires it to transfer all remains of captives. The organization said it is now working together with Egyptian authorities.

Donald Trump has cautions Hamas to begin returning the bodies "promptly, or the additional nations participating in this great peace will intervene".

An Israeli spokesperson said the crew from Egypt has been authorized to collaborate with the Red Cross to locate the bodies, and would use digging equipment and vehicles for the search past the "yellow line".

The "yellow line" indicates the boundary running along the northern, south and east of the Gaza territory that Israel withdrew to, as part of the initial phase of the truce agreement.

Until now, Israeli authorities has not authorized the access of these crews.

The Egyptian government, along with Qatar and Turkey, is a key signatory of the mediated by Trump peace initiative for Gaza, which was ratified in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh earlier this month.

The development will be welcomed by relatives, desperate to give them a proper burial.

The International Committee of the Red Cross has already been deeply engaged in the repatriation of captives.

The organization does not hand over its captives - living or deceased - directly to the IDF, but instead to the ICRC, which in turn accompanies them through Gaza and hands them on to the Israeli military.

But the entry of digging crews from Egypt inside the Gaza Strip is a recent development.

After more than two years of heavy shelling by Israel, the United Nations estimates that as much as eighty-four percent of the area has been reduced to rubble.

The group claims it is making every effort to retrieve remains of captives, but it faces difficulty locating them under rubble of buildings bombed out by the Israeli military in the region.

It is now working in coordination with the officials in Egypt.

On Sunday, an official representative said that the organization knew where the bodies were.

"If the group made more of an effort, they would be able to recover the bodies of our hostages," the representative said.

The former president posted on his Truth Social platform on Saturday that measures would be taken if the bodies of the deceased hostages were not handed back quickly.

"Some of the remains are hard to reach, but others they can return now and, for unknown reasons, they are not. Perhaps it has to do with their disarming," he said.

Trump added: "Let's see what they accomplish over the coming two days. I am monitoring the situation very closely."

• Gaza minors losing their lives as they await Israel to enable relocations
• The US Secretary of State states many nations willing to participate in the region's peacekeeping unit
• Recent photographs show demarcation zone further into the territory than expected

On Sunday, the Israeli leader announced the country would decide which international troops it would permit as part of a planned international force in Gaza to help maintain the ceasefire under the former president's initiative.

"We are in control of our security, and we have also made it clear regarding foreign troops that Israel will decide which forces are unacceptable to us, and this is how we operate and will continue to operate," he declared speaking at the beginning of a cabinet meeting.

On Friday, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio indicated "a lot of nations" had volunteered to be part of the force - but added Israeli authorities would have to be satisfied with participants.

This seemed like a reference to the Turkish government, amid accounts Israel had rejected the country's involvement.

It remained unclear, however, how such a force could be stationed without an agreement with Hamas.

Israel initiated a armed operation in Gaza in following the incidents of October 7th, in which Hamas-led gunmen killed about twelve hundred people and took two hundred fifty-one others as captives.

At least sixty-eight thousand five hundred nineteen have been lost their lives in military actions in Gaza since then, according to the territory's Hamas-run health ministry.