The body of 31-year-old Maria Peshkuryova was believed to have been recovered from the rubble of a residential building that was directly hit by an Iranian missile more than four days ago. Four of Peshkuryova’s relatives were also killed in the blast. The death toll from the impact has now risen to nine victims.

Open gallery view Maria Peshkuryova.

The body was transported to Israel’s National Center for Forensic Medicine for official identification.

The names of the four other Ukrainian citizens, all members of the same family, were released on Wednesday: Olena Sokolova, 54; Ilya Peshkuryov, 14; Kostyantyn Tutevich, 10; and Anastasia Buryk Peshkuryova, 7.

According to the Magen David Adom rescue service, 99 people were wounded at the impact site overnight into Sunday.

Maria’s daughter, 7-year-old Anastasia, who was also killed, suffered from leukemia, and the two were in Israel for her treatment.

Lena Dubrovner, a social activist who helps Ukrainians who fled the Russia-Ukraine war there and are staying in Israel, told Haaretz that she knew the family well. She says that the grandmother, Olena, arrived in Israel with her daughter, Maria, and granddaughter, Anastasia, in late 2022.

Just over a year ago, in the spring of 2024, they were joined by the sons of Olena’s other daughter and Maria’s sister, Ilya and Kostyantyn. Their mother said that the family plans to cremate their remains and return them for burial in Ukraine when that becomes possible.

On the night of the strike, a representative from An Opportunity for Life went to the family’s home after hearing that it had been hit. “I planned to take them to my home. I thought they’d be standing outside in pajamas, and I’d simply put them in the car and take them to my home,” she said. But when she arrived there, she couldn’t find them.

After running around and shouting Anastasia’s surname, Buryk, the Fire and Rescue Service referred her to the school where many of the building’s residents had been evacuated to. There, she was told that “the family from Odessa who came for treatment” was under the rubble.

She went to the hospital in the hope that at least some of the family had survived, but they weren’t there either. Then, she began to receive phone calls from the Fire and Rescue Service and the Home Front Command, requesting details about the family and asking her to go to Abu Kabir, Israel’s national institute of forensic medicine.

The representative identified the bodies of the children and their grandmother and has been in constant contact with the authorities to find their mother, Maria. She said the authorities have checked if she left the country, and efforts to find her body under the rubble continue.

Maria’s last Instagram post, a few hours before the missile hit the family home, shows her daughter, Anastasia, sitting on the bed, answering her questions.

British Foreign Secretary David Lammy will travel to Geneva on Friday for talks with his French and German counterparts, as well as EU High Representative Kaja Kallas and Iran’s foreign minister, to push for a diplomatic resolution over Iran’s nuclear programme, its foreign ministry said on Thursday.

The meeting comes amid heightened tensions in the Middle East and follows Lammy’s visit to Washington, where he met U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and White House Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff.

“We are determined that Iran must never have a nuclear weapon… A window now exists within the next two weeks to achieve a diplomatic solution,” Lammy said in a statement. “Now is the time to put a stop to the grave scenes in the Middle East and prevent a regional escalation that would benefit no one.”