The Saudi channel Al-Hadath reported Sunday that the remains of Israeli spy Eli Cohen, who operated in Syria during the 1960s, are expected to soon be transferred to Israel.

The report was not verified and didn’t offer any further details.

Nadia Cohen, the spy’s widow, told Ynet: “The Mossad isn’t familiar with this story, and it isn’t known to them that he’s being returned.”

She described an “internal storm. I have hope that what’s happening in Syria will allow for more flexibility. I am full of optimism all the time, and it’s on my mind and my heart all the time. I haven’t lost hope.”

Cohen was captured and executed by the Syrian regime in 1965 and buried in Damascus. Over the years, Bashar al-Assad’s regime rejected Jerusalem’s requests to receive his body or exchange it for Syrian prisoners held in Israel.

Sunday’s report came some five months after a covert Israeli operation in Syria recovered some 2,500 documents and personal items belonging to Cohen.

Cohen, born in Egypt to a Jewish family, joined the Mossad in the early 1960s and infiltrated the top echelons of Syria’s political leadership under the alias Kamel Amin Thaabet.

The Saudi report also came amid Israeli efforts to reach a security agreement with Syria, in the wake of Assad’s overthrow last December by Islamist-led forces helmed by now-interim president Ahmed al-Sharaa.

The IDF has been deployed to nine posts inside southern Syria since December, mostly within a UN-patrolled buffer zone on the border between the countries.

Syrian officials have set a goal of reaching military and security agreements by the end of the year with Israel.

Last month, a senior official in the Trump administration told The Times of Israel that an emerging Israel-Syria security agreement was “99%” complete, even saying that an announcement was expected within the next two weeks, though this did not pan out.