Hamas released five out of an expected six Israeli hostages due to be freed from captivity in Gaza on Saturday, as a precarious ceasefire beset by recriminations nears the end of its first phase.
Avera Mengistu, a 39-year-old Ethiopian-Israeli man described by his family as mentally ill and held since 2014, and Tal Shoham, 40, were released in an elaborately staged ceremony in Rafah, southern Gaza, to the International Committee of the Red Cross.
Shortly after, Eliya Cohen, 27, Omer Shem Tov, 22, and Omer Wenkert, 23, were released in Nuseirat, in central Gaza, looking pale and thin, but in better physical condition than some of the hostages released this month.
The men were paraded onstage by armed Hamas fighters and appeared under pressure to wave and smile at the gathered crowds, despite repeated appeals by the Red Cross for the handovers to be private and dignified.
Hisham al-Sayed, a 36-year-old Palestinian Bedouin with Israeli nationality, also described as mentally ill, is expected to be released separately later on Saturday. Mengistu and Al-Sayed had both been held by Hamas for almost a decade after wandering into Gaza of their own accord.
The others were captured during the Palestinian militant group’s assault on Israel on October 7 2023, from kibbutzim near the border and a music festival where hundreds of Israelis were killed.
The Israeli military confirmed their releases, saying that all five had been transported into southern Israel by the Red Cross.
In exchange for the release of all six, Israel is set to free 602 Palestinian prisoners, including hundreds held without charge or trial and 110 serving life or long sentences after being convicted in military prisons for violence against Israelis.
Including today’s swap, Hamas will have released 29 hostages, four of them dead, in exchange for more than 1,600 Palestinian prisoners, a potential boost to its political standing among Palestinians in Gaza despite the devastating consequences of its assault on Israel.
The six are the last of the living hostages to be swapped for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners as part of the first phase of the ceasefire, which is set to end on Thursday with the release of four additional bodies.
The second phase, for which negotiations have yet to begin in earnest, could see a permanent end to 15 months of war in exchange for the release of some 60 or so remaining hostages, which include male soldiers and also many presumed to be dead.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right coalition allies are bitterly opposed to a long-term truce, and have demanded that the military resume its war with Hamas.
The six-week first phase has come close to collapse, prompting interventions from the US, Egypt and Qatar to help keep it on track, after Hamas accused Israel of withholding permission for humanitarian aid, including heavy equipment to excavate bodies trapped under rubble as well as mobile homes and tents for displaced Palestinians.
In the latest flashpoint, Hamas earlier this week released an unidentified body instead of that of Shiri Bibas, a 32-year-old Israeli mother whose two young children were also captured in the October 7 attacks. Their bodies were released earlier this week.
Late on Friday Hamas released a second body, subsequently identified by Israeli forensic pathologists as Bibas, mother to Kfir and Ariel. Hamas blamed the chaos within the shattered Palestinian enclave for handing over the wrong body.
In Israel the capture of the Bibas family — the children’s father was released alive in February in the first stage of the exchanges — has become a symbol both of Hamas’s brutality in the attack that triggered the war in Gaza and the failure of Israeli authorities to protect them.
The Israeli military said on Friday that autopsies showed that both children had been murdered during their captivity, rather than killed by an Israeli air strike, as Hamas has said since November 2023.
Israeli military spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said on Friday that the two boys were not shot but instead killed by Hamas “with their bare hands”. “Afterwards, they committed horrific acts to cover up these atrocities,” Hagari added.
Despite the fraught first phase of the ceasefire, Israel has dispatched a low-level negotiations team to Cairo for talks on the second stage, but little progress has so far been made. Hamas has indicated its willingness to continue negotiations into the second phase.
Hamas killed at least 1,200 people in Israel in its cross-border raid on October 7, and took about 250 hostage, according to local officials. Israel’s retaliation has killed nearly 50,000 Palestinians, health officials in Gaza have said, and left the enclave — home to over 2.3mn Palestinians — in the grip of a humanitarian disaster.
