Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty says efforts are ongoing to return all the bodies of Israeli captives still in Gaza, Al Jazeera reports.

“We are doing our utmost efforts on the ground in order to collect the deceased bodies and to hand them over to the Israeli side in implementation of the agreement of Sharm el-Sheikh, phase one,” Abdelatty said in an interview with CNN.

He added that Egypt has kept daily contact with the US and Israeli sides, explaining that “collecting the remains will take some time” due to the level of destruction in the enclave.

On the Rafah border crossing between Egypt and Gaza, which Israel said earlier today was still not open for Palestinians to cross, Abdelatty said Cairo was speaking with Israel to open the border to “literally to flood Gaza with food and relief materials”.

He explained that the situation in Gaza has reached “catastrophic” levels.