Police and the Shin Bet said Tuesday afternoon that terrorist Ibrahim Hilo, who was revealed by ynet to have held in Gaza the body of fallen soldier Staff Sergeant Oron Shaul and later broke under interrogation, providing the information that led to his return for burial in Israel, will be indicted on serious security offenses.
The indictment will charge him with membership in a terrorist organization, possession of weapons in a terrorist organization and aiding the enemy during wartime.
4 View gallery
Oron Shaul's body was brought back to Israel for burial more than a decade after he was killed in Operation Protective Edge
(Photos: Family album, Efi Sharir, Gil Nehushtan)
In January 2025, the Shin Bet and IDF launched Operation Red South, in which the body of Shaul was returned to Israel. Shaul was killed in battle in Shejaiya on July 20, 2014, during Operation Protective Edge, and his body was abducted by Hamas.
As part of efforts to return him, a covert operation was carried out to arrest Hilo, a Hamas terrorist in the Shati Battalion. The investigation was conducted by the Lahav 433 International Crime Investigations Unit, in cooperation with the Shin Bet. Information was obtained about Hilo’s involvement in holding Shaul, and he was arrested and brought in for questioning.
During his Shin Bet interrogation, ynet revealed earlier this year, it emerged that Hilo had held Shaul’s body for nearly 10 years. He broke and provided information about the location where the fallen soldier’s body was being held — a civilian building in Gaza City.
Following the information, a Palestinian collaborator, guided by the Shin Bet and Military Intelligence, went alone to Hilo’s house overnight between Saturday and Sunday, Jan. 18-19, hours before the cease-fire took effect. He located the facility where the body was held, returned home to get burglary tools, and then used them while the IDF shelled open areas nearby with artillery to mask the noise.
Step by step: The discovery, the arrest and the interrogation that broke the terrorist
The first signs revealing something about the location of Shaul’s body began to emerge on the second day of Rosh Hashanah in 2024. During an IDF raid, forces seized an enemy computer containing correspondence between a Hamas operative and the former head of Hamas’ military wing in Gaza, Izz al-Din Haddad. In that correspondence, the Hamas operative warned Haddad: “Note that among the detainees held by the Israelis in Shifa [Shifa Hospital in Gaza], there is one of ours who knows where ‘the soldier from the tank’ is.”
4 View gallery
His body was found in the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood in Gaza
(Photo: Abdel Kareem Hana/AP)
When that correspondence reached intelligence officials, they understood that Israel was holding a detainee who knew details about the place where Shaul’s body was being held. After reviewing all the detainees from Shifa, officials focused on one suspect. He was brought in for renewed questioning, where he denied any connection to the incident. But after an intensive interrogation he told them about two other Palestinians he had met in the Hamad neighborhood of Khan Younis. According to him, the two told him in panic and fear that Israel had recently arrested a Palestinian who had brought Oron Shaul’s body to a Gazan named Ibrahim Hilo, who had held it until that day.
An intelligence check found that Hilo had been a Hamas platoon commander in 2014, but a decade later was working as a trader and living in the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood. According to the detainee, whom Israeli officials did not know to be reliable, Hilo was keeping the body in a facility in one of three stores beneath his home. An IDF check found that Israeli forces had already been in that house but had not examined the facility.
The problem quickly became clear: The IDF understood it could not raid the house in a noisy military operation, because there was a reasonable possibility that living hostages were being held nearby and could be harmed if a military force approached. Moreover, it was not at all certain that the information provided by the detainee was reliable. The conclusion was that if Israel wanted to interrogate Ibrahim Hilo, it had to abduct him through deception, without his surroundings knowing he had been taken, because then Shaul’s body would be moved elsewhere.
Intelligence officials discovered that Hilo had moved to a displaced persons camp in Deir al-Balah. Israeli security forces contacted him through deception and led him to become interested in involvement with them. Hilo, in effect, became an asset operated by the Israeli side without realizing it. He rented a warehouse near Salah al-Din Road, while the Israeli side got him used to arriving there to receive goods at both ordinary and unusual hours. Still, the challenge remained how to arrest Hilo without his people and surroundings understanding it, or reach the facility under his home without endangering living hostages.
Hilo’s Israeli handlers persuaded him to come to the warehouse, where he would usually collect goods, at 11 p.m. At the same time, an elite Israeli force prepared to abduct him from the warehouse. But that evening, Hilo refused to come. Perhaps he sensed something, perhaps it was chance, but it took considerable persuasion before he relented and left for the warehouse with his nephew. On the way, while the Israeli force prepared for the abduction, Hilo made a U-turn, returned to Deir al-Balah and the persuasion process began again.
Hilo agreed at the last moment and drove toward the warehouse. At that moment, the signal was given to the undercover force, but - like in a particularly tense thriller - the truck meant to serve the force would not start. After nerve-racking minutes, the truck started and the force abducted Hilo.
In the interrogation, conducted under enormous time pressure, Hilo did not break and admitted nothing. He denied any connection to the incident. The hours passed, and still there was no lead. The Israeli dilemma only grew: whether to risk soldiers and send them to Hilo’s house, just before the cease-fire, when there was no confirmation that Shaul was indeed in the facility beneath the home. At a relatively late stage of that critical day, Hilo broke and admitted: The body is with me under the house.
These were the days of the hostage deal. At that point, the dilemma returned: how to reach Hilo’s house without endangering living hostages, while IDF forces had already begun withdrawing from parts of Gaza City as part of the ceasefire. In the discussions, an unusual and groundbreaking idea arose: sending a Palestinian collaborator to Hilo’s house.
The Palestinian collaborator went alone to Hilo’s house overnight between Saturday and Sunday, Jan. 18-19, hours before the cease-fire took effect. He moved quietly in the dark, reached the house and located the facility, but discovered it was locked with a relatively heavy lock. He decided to return home again to bring burglary tools, but made clear to the Shin Bet handler operating him that trying to break the lock late at night could wake the entire neighborhood. At that moment, the decision was made for the IDF to fire artillery at open areas nearby, solely to create enough noise for the Palestinian collaborator to break the lock without being discovered.
Under cover of the artillery noise, the Palestinian broke the lock and found Shaul’s body. He then set out on a long walk of about 1.5 kilometers with the body. Only after long minutes that felt like an eternity to everyone sitting in the command posts and operations rooms that night did the Palestinian link up with an IDF force, which removed Shaul’s body in armored Namer vehicles belonging to the Golani Brigade — the same brigade in which Shaul had served.
The Shin Bet and police said that after Lahav 433 investigators established an evidentiary basis, the Southern District Prosecutor’s Office filed a prosecutor’s statement Tuesday morning with the Beersheba District Court announcing its intention to file an indictment against Ibrahim Hilo on serious security offenses.