Four female Israeli soldiers to be released as part of ceasefire deal, Hamas says

JERUSALEM – Four female soldiers are set to be released by Hamas on Saturday as part of the ceasefire and hostage release deal it struck with Israel, the militant group said.

Karina Ariev, Danielle Gilboa, Naama Levy and Liri Albag will be transferred to Israeli custody in exchange for Palestinian prisoners, Abu Obeida, the spokesman for Hamas’ military wing, the Al-Qassam Brigades, said in a Telegram post.

All four hostages are alive, Basem Naim, a senior Hamas official, told NBC News in a separate statement.

He added that 200 prisoners would be released, including 120 sentenced to life and 80 who had been sentenced to long prison terms. He did not provide further details.

Israel has not confirmed the names of those to be released, but if successful, it would be the second such exchange as part of a complex ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas, which came into effect last Sunday and signaled a break in 15 months of bitter fighting and Israeli aerial bombardment in Gaza.

As part of the ceasefire, which saw the first people released on both sides last Sunday, Hamas will release one civilian hostage for every 30 Palestinians held in Israeli custody and one female Israeli soldier for 50 prisoners heading the other way.

In a sign of the fluid and fragile progress of negotiations, Hamas said on Monday it would next release hostages held in Gaza on Saturday, after one of its officials had initially suggested they would be released a day later than expected.

The release last Sunday of the first three Israeli hostages and 90 Palestinian prisoners, all women and children, faced a last-minute delay, with the Israeli government saying it had not been provided with the names of the hostages to be released.

The first three Israeli hostages to be released were Romi Gonen, Doron Steinbrecher and Emily Damari, a dual British citizen. Hamas has said it plans to release 33 hostages over six weeks, while Israeli forces will gradually withdraw from the Gaza Strip.

The fighting in Gaza began on October 7, 2023, when Hamas carried out a terrorist attack on Israel, killing 1,200 people and taking about 250 hostages. Israel then launched an air and ground assault on Gaza, killing more than 47,000 people, most of them civilians, according to health officials in the enclave.

The four hostages released by Hamas on Saturday were captured while serving as surveillance soldiers stationed at the Nahal Oz military base on the Gaza border. There they were tasked with observing suspicious military movement.

A fifth female soldier taken hostage, Agam Berger, 20, remains in Gaza.

Several of their colleagues were killed on October 7, 2023, but video footage of the surviving women taken during their capture has been widely circulated on social media and broadcast media.

For three months before the Hamas terror attack, Karina Ariev, 20, had been warning her family of impending war, her sister Sasha Ariev told the Christian Broadcasting Company, days after her sister was taken.

“They knew something, the girls who were the eyes of the country,” Sasha Ariev said, adding that her sister called her the morning of the Hamas attack. Sasha Ariev said her siblings told her she could hear gunshots and screams in the background and received a text from her sister telling her “the terrorists are here.”

Footage circulating on the day Ariev was kidnapped showed her in a jeep, her face bloodied and her hands bound. Last January, Hamas released a video showing she was still alive.

Daniella Gilboa, now 20, had told her commanders in the run-up to Oct. 7 that she had seen people she suspected were Hamas militants showing up to prepare for an attack, her mother, Orly Gilboa, said. in August on The Meaningful People. podcast.

Orly Gilboa said she heard from Daniella Gilboa the morning of the attack, but did not realize the explosions her daughter described were inside her base. She only fully appreciated the danger her daughter was in after she received a “pray for me” message.

During the first night after she was taken, the mother said she was unable to identify her daughter in any footage and feared the worst. The next day, Daniella Gilboa’s younger sister, Noam Gilboa, identified her in widely circulated videos, recognizing her by her ponytail and pajamas.

According to Shira Albag, her daughter Liri Albag, 19, enjoyed traveling and taking pictures. At a public event last fall, Shira Albag told the audience that “we all live in the shadow of the kidnapping.”

On February 4, the day of her daughter’s 19th birthday, she wrote a public letter to her, which was published by the Israeli news site Ynet.

“There’s no music in the house because you’re the one singing… There’s no noise of cooking in the middle of the night… I miss you so much my heart hurts,” she wrote.

Naama Levy, 20, is one of the more recognizable of the five women because she was so clearly captured on video in Gaza on the morning of October 7.

In footage shared with NBC News, she can be seen barefoot, wearing gray sweatpants and a black T-shirt, with her hands tied behind her back and blood on her ankles. A man wearing a flak jacket and holding a gun can be seen pulling her by the hair and pushing her into a car. There is blood on one of her arms.

Another video circulated by Levy’s family showed the moment she was captured, with men tying her hands behind her back. With a bloodied face, Levy can be heard telling them in Hebrew that she has friends in Palestine.

Naama Levy’s mother, Ayelet Levy-Shacher, said her daughter had been involved in a youth program aimed at promoting peace and had volunteered at a kindergarten for refugee children before the attack.

“She believed in the good in people, and so do I,” she said.

Tovah Lazaroff reported from Jerusalem, Raf Sanchez from Tel Aviv and Astha Rajvanshi from London.