JERUSALEM – Four female soldiers will be freed by Hamas on Saturday as part of the ceasefire and hostage release deal it reached 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, spokesman for Hamas’s 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 will be released, including 120 sentenced to life imprisonment and 80 to long sentences. He did not provide further details about the prisoners who will be released.
If successful, the releases will be the second such exchange as part of a complex ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas, which came into effect last Sunday and marked a pause in 15 months of fierce fighting and Israeli airstrikes in Loop.
As part of the truce, in which the first people on both sides were released last Sunday, Hamas will release one civilian hostage for every 30 Palestinians detained in Israeli custody and one female Israeli soldier for every 50 detainees headed in the direction contrary.
In a sign of the fluidity and fragility of the negotiations, Hamas said on Monday it would release the 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 due to be released.
The first three Israeli hostages freed were Romi Gonen, Doron Steinbrecher and Emily Damari, who have dual British citizenship. Hamas has said it plans to release 33 hostages within six weeks as Israeli forces gradually withdraw from the Gaza Strip.
Fighting in Gaza began on October 7, 2023, when Hamas carried out a terrorist attack against Israel in which 1,200 people were killed and around 250 taken hostage. At that time, Israel launched an air and ground attack on Gaza, killing more than 47,000 people, most of them civilians, according to health officials in the enclave.
The four hostages Hamas was set to free on Saturday were taken captive while serving as guard soldiers stationed at the Nahal Oz military base on the border with Gaza. There, they were assigned the task of observing suspicious military movements in the enclave.
A fifth female soldier taken hostage, Agam Berger, 20, will remain in Gaza.
Several of her 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 in the media.
For three months before the Hamas terrorist attack, Karina Ariev, 20, had warned her family of an impending war, her sister Sasha told Christian Broadcasting Company, days after her sister was taken away.
“They knew something, the girls who were the eyes of the country,” Sasha said, adding that her sister called her the morning of the Hamas attack. Sasha said her brother told her he could hear gunshots and screams in the background and received a message from her sister telling her “the terrorists are here.”
Images that circulated the day Ariev was kidnapped showed her in a jeep, her face bloodied and her hands tied. In January last year, Hamas released a video showing that 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 appearing to prepare for an attack, her mother Orly said in August on the Meaningful podcast. People.
Orly said he heard from Daniella the morning of the attack, but did not understand that the explosions his daughter described occurred inside their base. She only fully realized the danger her daughter was in after receiving a message saying “pray for me.”
During the first night after she was kidnapped, Orly said she couldn’t identify Daniella on any recordings and feared the worst. The next day, Noam, Daniella’s younger sister, identified her in widely circulated videos, recognizing her by her ponytail and pajamas.
According to her mother, Shira, 19-year-old Liri Albag liked to travel and take photographs. At a public event last fall, Shira told the audience that “we all live in the shadow of kidnapping.”
On February 4, her daughter’s 19th birthday, Shira wrote a public letter to Liri that was published by the Israeli news site Ynet.
“There is no music in the house because it is you who sings… There is no kitchen noise in the middle of the night… I miss you so much that my heart hurts,” he wrote.
Naama Levy, 20, is one of the five most recognizable women because she was clearly captured on video in Gaza on the morning of October 7.
In images 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 bulletproof vest and carrying a gun can be seen pulling her by her light brown hair and pushing her toward a car. There is blood on one of his arms.
A second video released by Levy’s family showed the moment of his capture, with men tying his hands behind his back. With a bloodied face, Levy can be heard telling them in Hebrew that he has friends in Palestine.
Naama’s mother, Levy Shacher, said her daughter had been involved in a youth program aimed at fostering peace and had volunteered at a daycare for refugee children before the attack.
“She believed in the goodness of people, and so did I,” he said.
Tovah Lazaroff reported from Jerusalem and Raf Sánchez from Tel Aviv. Astha Rajvanshi reported from London.
