A few months into the war, a senior American official told me privately something I could not bring myself to print.
Even when the shooting stops, he said, Hamas and other armed factions will not be able to account for every Israeli killed on or after October 7. “There will be a few Ron Arads.”
A national metaphor for uncertainty
I knew what that meant, but many readers do not, so I'll explain. Ron Arad was an Israeli Air Force navigator who bailed out over Lebanon in 1986, was captured alive by the Amal militia, and then disappeared into the fog of militias, intelligence services, and rumor.
For decades, Israel has searched for its fate. No verified burial place has ever been found.
Arad is a national metaphor for uncertainty, for the family that never receives a body, for a story that will not end.
We did not report that warning when I first heard it. The briefing was deep background, and more importantly, it felt wrong to strike at families’ hope without hard evidence. Wednesday's CNN exclusive moved the private fear into the public square.
Hamas likely unable to return all remaining hostages
According to three Israeli sources cited in the report, Israel now assesses that Hamas may be unable to find and return all of the remaining dead hostages.
The numbers are grim and imprecise by nature. There are 20 hostages assessed to be alive, with grave concerns for two of them. Among 28 that are known to be deceased, Israeli officials believe a subset of their remains may be unrecoverable.
A senior US official, Assistant Secretary of State Barbara Leaf, explained why. Hamas never controlled every captive. In a fragmented battlefield, recovering all the living is more likely than recovering every set of remains.
Once you accept that possibility, you begin to see why the talks in Egypt are so sensitive at the level of commas and clauses. Israel’s formal position is simple and morally correct. Bring everyone home, the living and the dead, and only then does the war end.
However, negotiations are not conducted in the realm of moral clarity alone. Lists have been exchanged. Timelines are being drafted. The entire process rests on a US-backed framework that ties hostages, withdrawals, and future governance into a phased plan.
If a handful of remains cannot be located now, that uncertainty can become either a reason to stall everything or a problem to be solved within the agreement. Which of those it becomes will depend on precise language, credible verification, and the political will to keep moving.
Israel no stranger to pain
Israel has lived with this pain before. Lt. Hadar Goldin was killed during the 2014 war, and his body was taken into Gaza. His parents have fought for years to bring him home. Their campaign has kept the ethos of “no one left behind” at the center of public life, and it is why any talk of “irrecoverable” remains unbearable to many Israelis, not theoretical.
The phrase “a few Ron Arads,” which senior figures now use in private, lands on a society that has already paid this price and refuses to normalize it.
Still, hiding from hard facts does not serve the families or the country. If Hamas cannot produce every body today, then the agreement needs to say what happens tomorrow.
It needs a clearly defined process that brings every living hostage home first, that secures immediate transfer of any remains that can be found, that commits all sides to time-bound, internationally supervised searches after the ceasefire, and that prevents a small number of tragic unknowns from becoming permanent leverage to delay everything else.
Which brings me back to that off-the-record remark. At the time, it sounded like a worst-case warning wrapped in a historical metaphor. Today, it sounds like the reality the negotiators must write around.
The government will continue to demand that all hostages come home, and it should. Mediators will continue to press Hamas to locate and return every person, and they should.
Protecting the living
But a responsible agreement will also contain a path for what happens if some are still missing, with international forensics, independent certification, and automatic transfer should remains be discovered later. That is how you protect the living: tell the truth to the bereaved and keep faith with a country that promises to bring its people back.
When Israelis hear the name Ron Arad, they think of a mother and father who waited, of a cabinet that kept trying, of a society that could not bear the open wound, yet refused to cauterize it with lies.
If there will indeed be “a few Ron Arads” from this war, then the duty is to keep searching, to speak plainly, and to design a deal sturdy enough to carry unbearable truths. That is what it looks like to bring as many people home as possible while refusing to forget those who did not come back at all.