Final hostage returns home. Inside Operation Courageous Heart
The Times of Israel Daily Briefing
The Times of Israel
4.5 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 27 January 2026
⏱️ 25 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Welcome to The Times of Israel's Daily Briefing, your 20-minute audio update on what's happening in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world.
Military correspondent Emanuel Fabian joins host Amanda Borschel-Dan for today's episode.
Impromptu gatherings across Israel last night marked the first time in over 11 years without hostages being held in Gaza, following the return of Ran Gvili’s body to Israel.
For more than 50 days, he was the only hostage still held in Gaza, amid Hamas’s insistence that it had been unable to locate him, leaving his family and country fearful he might never be recovered.
In today's episode, Fabian takes us through Operation Courageous Heart and its massive team of soldiers and forensics experts, which successfully recovered Gvili's remains after checking over 250 bodies in a Gazan cemetery.
Check out The Times of Israel's ongoing liveblog for more updates.
For further reading:
All of them are home now: Body of last hostage Ran Gvili found in Gaza, returned to Israel
Subscribe to The Times of Israel Daily Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was produced by Podwaves and Ari Schlacht.
IMAGE: A woman walks by chairs with photos of Ran Gvili, the final hostage in Gaza who was killed while fighting Hamas militants during the October 7, 2023 attack and whose remains have been recovered, in a plaza known as Hostages Square in Tel Aviv, Israel, January 26, 2026. (AP Photo/Oded Balilty)
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Times of Israel's daily briefing. Today is Tuesday, January 27th. I'm Amanda Borschal Dan, |
| 0:10.7 | here with our military correspondent, Emmanuel Fabian. Many, thank you so much for joining me today. |
| 0:16.1 | Amanda. Today is the first day in 844 days that we are not marking the day of the war, |
| 0:23.8 | following the return of the final hostage Rangvili from Gaza yesterday. |
| 0:29.1 | For the first time since 2014, there is no Israeli hostage held in Gaza. |
| 0:35.2 | So today we're going to go into the Operation Courageous Heart that did |
| 0:39.2 | recover the body of Rangvili yesterday. All of this and more when we're back. |
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| 1:37.1 | And we're back. |
| 1:42.0 | I'm Amanda Borchelle Dan here with their military correspondent, Emmanuel Fabian. |
| 1:46.5 | Impromptu gatherings took place all over Israel last night as Israelis celebrated the return of Rangvili. |
| 1:53.3 | We took to social media posting pictures and reels of taking off all the hostage banners, the flags, the yellow pins from ourselves as we celebrated |
| 2:03.4 | the return of Rangvili home. For more than 50 days, he was the final hostage kept in Gaza following |
... |
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