Egyptian officials and the United Nations envoy in the region are now trying to broker a broader arrangement for a long-term truce that would allow significant investment in development projects in Gaza.

But Israel’s defense minister, Avigdor Lieberman, said on Wednesday that any long-term deal with Gaza must include an arrangement for the return of the remains of Lieutenant Goldin and another soldier, Sgt. Oron Shaul, who was also killed during the 2014 war, as well as at least two Israeli citizens who are believed to be alive and held by Hamas in Gaza.

This was not the military’s first inquiry exonerating itself for events in Gaza in 2014. Adalah, a group that advocates for Arab minority rights in Israel, has appealed to Israel’s attorney general to open a criminal investigation and reject the military’s closure of a case involving a drone attack that killed four Palestinian boys on a Gaza beach during the war.

But many have considered the events of that day in Rafah as one of the weightiest cases, not least because of the high number of casualties. At least 135 Palestinians were said to have been killed at the time, after Israeli forces unleashed a barrage of artillery, tank and airstrikes meant to prevent the militants from taking Lieutenant Goldin, who was dragged into a tunnel on the edge of Rafah.

The Israeli military said its troops killed at least 42 Palestinian military operatives in the course of the fighting, and that up to 70 civilians were “unintentionally killed as a result of attacks directed at military targets and military operatives.”

After the Hamas ambush that killed Lieutenant Goldin, along with two other soldiers, in the first hour of a 72-hour truce, Israeli commanders invoked the “Hannibal procedure,” a contentious directive that allowed for the use of maximum force to prevent captors from getting away with abducted soldiers — even at the risk of endangering the lives of the Israeli hostages. The directive has since been revoked.

In the first three hours, Israel fired more than 1,000 artillery shells in Rafah and dropped more than 40 bombs. Primary targets included intersections of the main road running through the area and locations that Israel suspected hid shafts leading to the tunnel.