A secretive Israeli military intelligence unit spent a decade piecing together clues from special forces raids, tunnel operations, Hamas double agents and interrogations of captured Gazan medical officials to locate the body of Lt. Hadar Goldin, eventually aiding in his 2025 return for burial, according to a Saturday report.

Goldin, 23 years old at the time of his death, was killed in Gaza on August 1, 2014, during that year’s Gaza war, just over an hour after the start of a 72-hour humanitarian ceasefire. Another soldier, Oron Shaul, was killed and captured days earlier.

The next year, the Israeli military tasked Col. Mem (identified only by his first initial in Hebrew), a 51-year-old reservist officer, to build a small team to help locate the pair’s bodies and bring them back to Israel for burial, according to a Ynet report.

That unit became known as “Bring Your Sons From Afar,” a quote from the Book of Isaiah.

According to Ynet, Col. Mem had experience in hostage‑related investigations dating back to 2008, when the Shin Bet formed a special team to examine the 2006 abduction of soldier Gilad Shalit at the Gaza border. After holding several senior posts in the Intelligence Corps, Mem was called back to duty in 2015 by then–chief of IDF staff Lt. Gen. Gadi Eisenkot.

Mem created a small team with two reserve officers, identified by their initials Shin and Dalet. Over time, dozens of intelligence and operational specialists joined the effort.

“Pretty quickly we understood that our mission was to find a needle in a haystack,” Shin told Ynet.

Mem briefed Eisenkot on Hamas’s protocol for handling abducted soldiers, the report said. According to Hamas procedure, the abductors immediately transfer the body to a “separation cell,” which hides the hostage without revealing the location to the original kidnappers.

Mem told Eisenkot that his unit had intelligence that Goldin’s body was being held by Hamas’s Rafah Brigade.

A potential breakthrough then came when a Palestinian asset told the Shin Bet: “I know you contacted me because of the information I have about the location of Hadar Goldin’s body.”

But by the time the intelligence agency was able to reach the source of the information, Hamas had already compromised the asset, and tried to turn them into a double agent. The team had reached a dead end.

The team then shifted to detailed analysis of helmet‑camera footage from soldiers who had entered the........

© The Times of Israel