Hamas on Saturday began to release all six remaining live Israeli hostages promised under the first stage of the ongoing cease-fire deal — as one heartbroken family finally received the remains of a mother murdered in terrorist captivity.
The two newly freed hostages — Tal Shoham and Avera Mengistu — were received by members of the International Committee to the Red Cross at the handover site in Rafah in southern Gaza.
The remaining four hostages — Eliya Cohen, Omer Shem Tov, Omer Wenkert and Hisham Al-Sayed — are expected to be released at a different location in the Gaza Strip later on Saturday.
The exchanges followed the horrific discovery that Hamas terrorists handed over the remains of a Gazan woman instead of Shiri Bibas, an Israeli mother whose body was supposed to be returned to Israel along with those of her two young sons.
The 32-year-old mom was kidnapped during the Oct. 7 attack, along with her boys, Ariel, 4, and Kfir, who at just 9 months was the youngest taken during the massacre.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed that Hamas will pay “the full price for this cruel and evil violation of the agreement.”
Hamas officials called it an “unfortunate mistake” and said they were investigating it, according to reports.
Israeli authorities confirmed Friday that Shiri Bibas’ body had been returned.
Autopsy results showed that terrorists murdered the boys “in cold blood” with their bare hands, the Israeli Defense Forces said Friday. Hamas had previously claimed they were killed in an air strike.
The Bibases became symbols of Hamas’ savagery after video of the family being mercilessly ripped from their home in Kibbutz Nir Oz ricocheted across the world. The terrorists put on a sick, macabre parade Thursday as they turned over the corpses thought to be hers and her sons’ as well as 84-year-old Oded Lifshitz.
Bibas’ husband, Yarden, was kidnapped separately and released alive on Feb. 1.
Among those released Saturday were a pair who’ve been held captive by the ghoulish terrorists in Gaza for at least a decade.
Mengistu and al-Sayed, had been held captive for at least 10 years before the terror group and its allies launched their bloodthirsty Oct. 7, 2023 rampage in Israel, killing 1,200 people and kidnapping another 251.
Mengistu, an Ethiopian-born Israeli national who Israel has said was struggling with mental health issues, was taken hostage after he crossed the Gazan border alone in September 2014, just two weeks after the end of that year’s deadly Israel-Gaza war, Ynet reported.
Al-Sayed, who Israeli officials have said also struggled with mental health issues, was kidnapped months later in February 2015, after also crossing the border, according to the Israeli outlet.
Three of the other hostages — Cohen, 27, Shem Tov, 22, and Wenkert, 23 — had all been abducted during the Oct. 7 massacre at the Nova music festival that left 364 revelers dead. Hamas killed Cohen’s nephew Amit ben Avida and his nephew’s girlfriend, along with Wenkert’s friend during the slaughter before taking roughly 44 captive.
Tal Shoham, meanwhile, had been visiting his in-laws in Kibbutz Be’eri when Hamas launched its brutal rampage.
Shoham and several of his family members, including his wife, two young daughters, and mother-in-law, were dragged to Gaza by Hamas, who killed his father-in-law during the attack. Shoham’s kin were freed during a brief cease-fire in November 2023.
The additional releases this week were likely prompted by Israel agreeing to allow mobile homes and construction equipment into the devastated Palestinian enclave.
Under the terms of the cease-fire deal’s first stage, 33 hostages are set to be released in exchange for roughly 1,900 Palestinian prisoners and detainees. The first stage of the fragile peace is expected to end March 2.
A suspected terror attack Thursday in which three buses near Tel Aviv exploded only added to tensions in the region.
Hamas is believed to have 59 hostages still in its clutches, roughly 36 of whom are thought to be dead, according to Israeli officials. At least four more bodies of slain hostages are expected to be released before the first stage of the cease-fire ends.
Among those predicted to be released in the second stage is Edan Alexander, 20, of Tenafly, NJ, who is the last American hostage thought to still be alive in Gaza.
Negotiations to hash out details of the truce’s next stage — initially outlined as seeing all live hostages returned in exchange for a permanent end to the war in Gaza — were supposed to start Feb. 4, but have not begun. Israeli officials said the talks would finally begin “this week.”
A senior Hamas official suggested ahead of the negotiations that the terror group was willing to release “all hostages in one batch” to Israel during the second stage of the cease-fire deal, at the cost of a permanent truce in Gaza.
Prime Minister Netanyahu, however, has repeatedly stressed that the Jewish state wouldn’t end its war in Gaza until Hamas was completely eradicated from the devastated enclave.
The Israeli leader this week also said this week that his country was committed to President Trump’s plan to remove more than 2 million Palestinians from Gaza and rebuild the enclave, according to the Times of Israel.
With Post wires
