GAZA CITY, Palestinian Territories, April 20, 2025 (BSS/AFP) - The fate of a US-Israeli hostage who Hamas said had featured in an Israeli truce proposal remains unknown, the group said on Saturday, separately releasing a video of another hostage alive.

The body of a guard assigned to the American-Israeli, Edan Alexander, had been recovered from the site of a recent Israeli strike, Hamas's armed wing the Ezzedine Al-Qassam Brigades said in a statement.

"But the fate of the prisoner and the rest of the captors remains unknown," the militants said.

Hamas on Thursday signalled its rejection of the plan which would have involved Alexander.

A senior Hamas official had on Monday said Israel proposed a 45-day ceasefire in exchange for the release of 10 living hostages, the first of which would have been the Israeli-American.

Alexander is among the dozens of living and dead captives still held in Gaza, 18 months after Hamas's war with Israel began.

Alexander had also featured in a proposal one month earlier from the United States Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff.

On Tuesday, Hamas announced it had "lost contact" with the militant unit holding Alexander following an Israeli air strike on their location in the Gaza Strip.

"We are trying to protect all the prisoners (hostages) and preserve their lives despite the brutality of the aggression... but their lives are in danger due to the criminal bombing operations carried out by the enemy army," Abu Obeida, spokesman for Hamas's armed wing, said in a statement on Saturday.

The Brigades on April 12 released a video showing Alexander alive, in which he criticised the Israeli government for failing to secure his release.

Alexander was serving as a soldier in an elite infantry unit on the Gaza border when he was abducted by Palestinian militants during their October 7, 2023 attack on Israel.

Of the 251 hostages taken during the attack, 58 remain in captivity in Gaza including 34 whom the Israeli military says are dead.

- Soldier killed -

Israel resumed its intense air strikes and ground offensive across Gaza on March 18 amid disagreement over the next phase in a ceasefire that for two months had largely halted the fighting.

Since then, at least 1,783 people have been killed in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run territory's health ministry.

Israel on Saturday announced its first military fatality in Gaza since the ceasefire's collapse.

Also on Saturday, the Al-Qassam Brigades released a video showing an Israeli hostage alive in Gaza speaking on a telephone in Hebrew.

Israeli campaign group the Hostages and Missing Families Forum identified the hostage as Elkana Bohbot, who was abducted from the site of a music festival in southern Israel in the October 7 attack.

The more than four-minute clip shows Bohbot sitting in a tiny room and purportedly talking to a friend and some family members.

It could not be confirmed whether such a call actually took place, and AFP was unable to verify when the video was filmed.

In the footage, Bohbot is seen speaking into a landline telephone, urging a friend to take his wife to the White House to meet US President Donald Trump in an effort to secure his release.

It is the third such video of Bohbot, a Colombian-Israeli, since March 24.

The hostage forum released a statement from his family who were "shocked and devastated" after the video release.

"We are extremely concerned about Elkana's physical and mental condition -- everyone can see it," the family said, asking why "the State of Israel" did not include the father of a young child in a list of those needing imminent release for humanitarian reasons.

Israelis rallied in Tel Aviv on Saturday night in a regular ritual calling for a deal for the hostages' release.

Hamas's October 7 attack resulted in the deaths of 1,281 people on the Israeli side, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.

Israel's military offensive since then has killed at least 51,157 people in Gaza, the majority of them civilians, according to the health ministry. The UN considers these figures reliable.