Three Israeli hostages and dozens of Palestinian prisoners released

Three Israeli hostages being held by Hamas in Gaza were released from captivity on Saturday, in exchange for 183 Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.

Yarden Bibas, 34, Ofer Kalderon, 53, and Keith Siegel, 65, were handed over to the Red Cross – the latest hostages to be released as part of a ceasefire deal struck last month.

The Palestinian prisoners were taken in buses to the West Bank, many of them coming from the nearby Ofer prison.

The tone of the exchange sat in stark contrast to Thursday’s chaotic handover, during which surging crowds pressed in on hostages, eliciting concern for their safety and prompting Israel to delay that day’s release of Palestinian prisoners.

Saturday’s release was more orderly, but retained the presentational elements that sought to project that Hamas remains the governing force in Gaza.

Lines of armed fighters kept crowds at bay, while the men who were released were flanked by more armed and masked fighters. A banner behind them bore the images of killed Hamas leaders.

Officials from the Red Cross signed certificates of release for Mr Kalderon and Mr Bibas, who were then made to hold them as they waved to the crowd in Khan Younis.

As Mr Siegel, a US-Israeli dual national, appeared on stage in Gaza City, a crowd gathered in Hostages Square in Tel Aviv erupted into cheers, some chanting: “He’s a hero, he’s a hero.” One woman described feeling “pure happiness”.

Mr Siegel’s wife, Adrienne, said “there’s no one happier than me” as she was filmed getting into a car to go and meet her husband.

The family of French-Israeli Mr Kalderon said in a statement that they were “overwhelmed with joy, relief, and emotion after 484 long and difficult days of unbearable waiting”.

They added that he “endured months in a nightmare”, holding onto the “hope of embracing his children again”.

But others, like Liz Domsky, had mixed feelings.

“They all need to come home,” she said while watching the proceedings from Hostages Square.

“I have a student there, Bar Kupershtein. I was a teacher in the high school where he studied. We are very worried about him. We hope he’ll come back. He’s not in the first list.”

There was a similar complexity of emotion in Israel over the release of Mr Bibas, whose wife, Shiri, and two young sons, Ariel and Kfir, were also kidnapped during the 7 October 2023 attack by Hamas.

Hamas claimed that they had been killed by an Israeli air strike early on in the ensuing war – but were named in a list of hostages it said in January it was willing to free.

Holding up an image of Kfir, who was just nine months old when he was taken, Andrea Wittenberg remarked: “They are children. They should be at home. It is impossible for them to be in Gaza.”

She added: “I don’t want to give up.”

Israeli President Isaac Herzog described Mr Bibas’s return as “simply heartbreaking”, saying his country remained “deeply concerned” about their fate. “As an entire nation we hold them in our hearts,” he wrote.

Herzog added that each released hostage “deserves the time to rehabilitate and rebuild their lives, and every one of the hostages deserves to come home soon”.

In Ramallah, in the occupied West Bank, buses of freed Palestinian prisoners were met by large and jubilant crowds.

“Today we were born again…we left the narrowness of the graves to the spaciousness of the world,” Nasrallah Muammar, who was released after 17 years in prison, said in his first statement, according to Palestinian media.

“Our people deserve freedom,” former prisoner Ali Al-Barghouti was quoted as saying after his release.

Saturday’s hostage release was more organised than the one on Thursday, when two Israelis and five Thai nationals were led through cheering crowds, who at times had to be pushed out of the way.

Described as “shocking scenes” by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel demanded – and received assurances – that they would not be repeated.

International Committee of the Red Cross President Mirjana Spoljaric had urged that security around the handovers be improved and they “take place in a safe and dignified manner”.

According to the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry, nearly 47,500 people have been killed in the territory since Israel invaded in the wake of the 7 October 2023 attack, in which around 1,200 Israelis were killed and 251 taken hostage.

A ceasefire and hostage release agreement between Israel and Hamas began on 19 January, with the first stage to see 33 hostages and 1,900 prisoners released, as well as hundreds of lorries carrying humanitarian aid being allowed into Gaza each day.

The Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt – a key humanitarian corridor – was also reopened on Saturday, after eight months of being closed.

The Gaza health ministry said 50 patients had left via the crossing to access medical care in Egypt.

Hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians have also been allowed to return to their homes in northern Gaza this week.

But Ashraf al-Dous, among them, said that some, including his father, have gone back to the south after seeing the scale of the destruction caused by Israeli air strikes.

“It really a mess,” he said. “The situation is catastrophic.”

Most of the floors in his apartment building in northern Gaza City have been destroyed, he said. “I didn’t expect the situation to be like this – it’s too much.”