Hamas frees two hostages as first phase of ceasefire nears end

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Hamas released the first two 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.

Mengistu had been held by Hamas after wandering into Gaza of his own accord while Shoham was taken captive during the Palestinian militant group’s assault on Israel on October 7 2023.

The Israeli military confirmed their release, saying that they had been transported into southern Israel by the Red Cross.

Eliya Cohen, 27, Omer Shem Tov, 22 and Omer Wenkert, 23 are due to be released later on Saturday, alongside Hisham al-Sayed, 36, a Palestinian Bedouin with Israeli nationality, who like Mengistu, is considered mentally ill and has been held since 2015.

In exchange for the release of all six, Israel is set to free 600 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.

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 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.

The six-week first phase has come close to collapse, prompting interventions from the US, Egypt and Qatar to help keep it on track.

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.

“The terrorists did not shoot the two young boys — they killed them with their bare hands,” Israeli military spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said. “Afterwards, they committed horrific acts to cover up these atrocities.”

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.