Hamas operative who allegedly held Oron Shaul’s body in Gaza to be charged this week

Ibrahim Hilu reportedly kept the remains of the 20-year-old soldier, killed in 2014 war, in a fridge under his shop in Gaza City, where they were recovered by the IDF in January 2025

State prosecutors will file charges this week against the Hamas operative who allegedly held the body of slain soldier Staff Sgt. Oron Shaul in the Gaza Strip for a decade, the Shin Bet, Israel Police, and Israel Defense Forces announced Tuesday.

Ibrahim Hilu, a former Hamas commander who fought in the terror group’s Shati Battalion, will be charged Thursday with “severe security offenses” in the Beersheba District Court, the security bodies said.

Specifically, he will be charged with membership in a terror organization, possession of a weapon as part of a terror organization, and support for an enemy at a time of war, according to the Ynet news site.

Shaul, 20 at the time of his death, was killed in Gaza City’s Shejaiya neighborhood during the 2014 Gaza War, when the armored personnel carrier he was traveling in came under fire from anti-tank missiles launched by Hamas.

His body was dragged away from the scene by Hamas operatives and subsequently held in Gaza for over a decade.

Israeli forces engineered the recovery of Shaul’s remains in a clandestine operation on January 19, 2025, shortly before a ceasefire took effect that same day.

Hilu, a Hamas commander turned shopkeeper, kept Shaul’s body in a refrigerator in one of three shops under his home in the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood of Gaza City, Ynet reported in January.

After capturing and interrogating Hilu, the Shin Bet and IDF Military Intelligence Directorate enlisted a Palestinian informant to break into his home and retrieve Shaul’s body from the locked fridge.

The informant extracted the body, wrapped it in a rug, and carried it for 1.5 kilometers (roughly one mile) to IDF forces awaiting him, according to the report.

Shaul was one of two soldiers whose bodies had been held since the 2014 war, known in Israel as Operation Protective Edge. Hadar Goldin, 23 at the time of his death, was killed in Gaza during a humanitarian ceasefire.

Goldin’s remains were returned last November, as part of a US-brokered hostage-ceasefire deal with Hamas that saw the return of all the terror group’s hostages, living and dead, and ended most of the fighting in the Strip sparked by Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel.