New Delhi: Handed over by Hamas as part of its ceasefire deal with Israel, the body of Nepali citizen Bipin Joshi, whom the Palestinian group had abducted during its October 7, 2023 attack, is set to be returned to his home country.Joshi was among the first four deceased hostages that Hamas handed over to Israel via the Red Cross on Monday (October 13) and who were transferred to the National Institute of Forensic Medicine in Tel Aviv to be identified.An official from the Nepali embassy in Tel Aviv visited the Institute and confirmed that Joshi’s body was identified, the country’s foreign ministry announced on Tuesday, adding that the mission thereafter began the process of repatriating his remains to Nepal in coordination with Israeli authorities.“We are all shocked by the news of the death of Bipin Joshi. We express our … deepest condolences to the bereaved family at this sad time,” the foreign ministry in Kathmandu said in a statement in Nepali.“It is requested,” it continued, that once his remains are repatriated, initiatives be carried out to “find out the truth about the real cause and circumstances of his death, to ensure justice and to provide his family with social security, compensation, insurance, facilities, etc.”Earlier, Israel’s military had informed the Nepali ambassador, Joshi’s family as well as Israeli government officials in a virtual meeting that he was not named as “among the prisoners to be released and his condition was unknown”, the ministry said.Until the ceasefire, Joshi remained the only non-Israeli person taken hostage by Hamas in October 2023 who had not yet been declared dead, the Haaretz newspaper had noted.Israel’s military said on Tuesday that it appeared Joshi was killed during the first few months of the Gaza war.Hamas during its October 7, 2023 attack kidnapped Joshi and others from the Alumim kibbutz near Israel’s border with Gaza, where he was living as part of an agricultural work-study programme and had arrived a month before.He was abducted by Hamas militants from a dining hall in the kibbutz in which he had hidden himself. His friends had recalled to Haaretz that when they were in a bomb shelter earlier that day Joshi remained calm when a grenade was lobbed into the enclosure, grabbed it and threw it outside despite having no military training, following which it exploded.His mother and his sister, who had travelled to Israel and lobbied for his release over the last two years, earlier this month released a video of Joshi in Hamas captivity that is estimated to have been from November 2023 but which Israeli forces had refused to allow in the public domain.Given that he was otherwise last seen alive in October 2023, his family had hoped that the video may have been a sign that Joshi was still alive.A day after it released the first four deceased hostages – following which Tel Aviv said the group had violated its end of the deal by not releasing all its dead captives and that it would allow fewer aid trucks into Gaza – Hamas on Tuesday released four more bodies via the Red Cross, the Israeli military announced.The identities of these bodies are yet to be announced.As part of the ceasefire deal and US President Donald Trump’s ‘peace proposal’ for Gaza, Hamas had on Monday released the 20 living hostages in its custody, while Israel released close to 2,000 Palestinian prisoners to the West Bank and to Gaza.Hamas fighters on Tuesday were seen regaining control of Gaza cities and neighbourhoods where Israeli forces have withdrawn.In Gaza City, Hamas’s black-masked police were seen armed and patrolling the streets. Reuters reports that the group’s fighters carried out executions on the street.While the fragile truce has largely held, both sides have exchanged accusations of violations.On Tuesday Hamas accused Israel of violating the truce by killing several Palestinians, while the Israeli military argued that it opened fire when unidentified Palestinians approached the “yellow line” defined in the ceasefire deal.Hamas in its October 7, 2023 terror attack on Israel took around 250 people hostage and killed some 1,200 others.In response Israel launched a brutal military campaign in Hamas’s base of Gaza which killed over 67,000 Palestinians, ruined much of the coastal strip and its infrastructure and invited comparisons to genocide.With inputs from DW.