Hamas released six hostages from Gaza on Saturday, handing over the final living captives whom the warring sides agreed would be freed when a ceasefire began last month.
Israel is due to release about 600 Palestinian detainees in exchange.
In the southern Gaza city of Rafah, Red Cross authorities received the first two freed captives, 40-year-old Tal Shoham and 38-year-old Avera Mengistu. Shoham, his wife, mother-in-law, and two children were abducted from Kibbutz Be’eri; they were all freed in November 2023. In 2014, Mengistu, an Ashkelon-born Israeli, entered Gaza.
Three of the captives, Eliya Cohen, 27, Omer Shem Tov, 22, and Omer Wenkert, 23, were later released in a highly staged ceremony in Nuseirat, central Gaza, where thousands of people, including Hamas fighters, assembled. Several kids wearing shirts featuring images of the slain Hamas leaders made their stage debuts.
At the Nova music festival, which is close to the Gaza border, the three guys were abducted. Compared to some of the previously released hostages, whose health alarmed Israel, they seemed thinner but in better shape. Shem Tov blew a kiss in the direction of the audience and seemed to interact with some of the Hamas fighters on stage.
According to an Israeli intelligence source and a Hamas source, the Red Cross in Gaza received the sixth hostage, 37-year-old Hisham al-Sayed, an Arab-Israeli from a Bedouin hamlet in southern Israel who went into Gaza in 2015.
According to reports, Mengistu and Al-Sayed both suffer from severe mental illnesses. The four others were abducted during the October 7, 2023, attack, whereas they were taken by Hamas almost ten years previously.
The captives had entered Israel, according to the Israeli military, and will be evaluated medically before being reunited with their relatives.
The list of about 600 inmates and detainees who are anticipated to be released in exchange was sent to the Palestinian Prisoners Office on Saturday. Of those, 445 had been held in detention in Gaza since October 7, 2023, 50 had been serving life sentences, and 60 had been given lengthy terms.
The last surviving prisoners that Israel and Hamas agreed to trade when indirect negotiations in Qatar last month resulted in a truce accord are the ones being freed on Saturday.
The “completion of a hostage deal is a humanitarian, moral, and Jewish imperative,” stated Israeli President Isaac Herzog on Saturday.
The released hostages of today, he said, “return from the depths of hell to begin the process of healing and recovery alongside their loving families, who fought with all their strength for them.”
Shoham and Mengistu were paraded on stage with armed and masked militants on each side of them just before they were turned over to the Red Cross in Rafah. They were given papers, and Shoham had to speak in front of the assembly.
Following a public outrage over Hamas releasing the incorrect body, the remains of another captive, Shiri Bibas, arrived in Tel Aviv on Friday night.
In addition to her sons, Kfir and Ariel, and another prisoner, Oded Lifshitz, Bibas’ remains were anticipated to be among the four captives that Hamas returned on Thursday.
Although Israeli officials’ forensic testing verified that the bones contained those of Lifshitz and the two boys, the fourth body was not Shiri Bibas’s, and it did not resemble the remains of any other Israeli captive, which infuriated and condemned the country.
On Friday night, a convoy bearing Bibas’ remains—which Hamas had given to the Red Cross—arrived in Tel Aviv.
Our Shiri was taken home last night. The Hostages and Missing Families Forum released a statement from Shiri’s family on Saturday, saying, “We received the news this morning that we had feared: our Shiri was murdered in captivity after the identification process at the Institute for Forensic Medicine.”
Hamas and its supporters will still be holding 63 Israeli hostages in Gaza following Saturday’s releases. The Israeli government claims that at least 32 of them are dead, including Hadar Goldin, a soldier who has been detained since 2014.
The first step of the deal’s transfer procedure will be finished if the four additional captive bodies are freed as scheduled next week.
The truce is being extended through indirect talks between Israel and Hamas. The start of those discussions was delayed by over two weeks.
Hamas said on Saturday that it is willing to turn over all of the Israeli prisoners that are still alive and dead in one group in return for Israeli soldiers leaving Gaza as part of the ceasefire’s next phase.
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