Omer Shem Tov, Eliya Cohen and Omer Wenkert were released on the nosely refugee field hours after two other hostages were delivered by Hamas to the Red Cross in Rafah. Sixth hostage is Bedouin and its release in Gaza will not be entitled to ceremony
Two hours after they were delivered by the Red Cross to the Israeli forces on the Rafah border in the south of the Gaza Strip, Hamas released three hostages out of a total of six that this Saturday saw their captivity comes to an end.
In yet another very aparadic ceremony, this time in Nusorde, in the center of the Palestinian Enclave, Omer Shem Tov, Eliya Cohen and Omer Wenkert were transported by Hamas militants to the stage, while their family and friends attended television release, waiting The reunion in Israel. Everyone had been kidnapped by the new music festival Hamas that took place in the south of the country on October 7, 2023 attacks.
Shem Tov, Luso-Israeli, was 20 years old when he was taken to the Gaza Strip, while his family accompanied the live abduction through the geolocation tool of his mobile phone, during a call in which he described everything that was happening to your return until the GPS signal was lost.
Last October 31, the day she turned 22 (her second birthday in captivity), Omer’s mother, Shelly Shem Tov, dedicated him to a post on Instagram where he asked followers to do “acts of kindness” and brought “light to the world” in his honor.
According to the president of the Israeli community of Porto, Gabriel Senderwicz, Shem Tov “was in the process of obtaining the Portuguese” when he was kidnapped. Fifteen months later, under the apparent instructions of the Hamas Chamber Operator, the young man kissed two of his armed kidnappers on his head.
In addition to Luso-Israeli, Hamas also released Omer Wenkert, a young volunteer who turned 23 in captivity after being taken from the same festival by Hamas. On a website created after its abduction, Wenkert’s family was concerned that captors were not guaranteeing medical care that they need to suffer from colitis, an autoimmune disease that generates ulcers in the digestive tract.
Foto: ashraf amra/anadolu via getty images
In the minutes that preceded his abduction, Omer managed to send a message to the parents where he said he was “scared to death.” And as the Jerusalem Post points out, although many families have been not sure if their loved ones had been taken alive or murdered in the October 7 attacks, Omer’s family knew in a few hours that he was alive after Hamas published a video in which the young man was tied a van in underwear, with images later showing him lying on the floor already in Gaza.
Eliya Cohen, 26, the third of the three hostages released late Saturday morning, was also kidnapped from the new festival, where she was with her girlfriend, Ziv, when Hamas militants launched her attack. Upon hearing the sirens, the couple took refuge in a shelter that would later be renamed “shelter of death,” as the strikers killed most of their occupants. While Eliya was kidnapped, Ziv managed to hide from the captors by remaining six hours hidden under the bodies of the dead festival. His nephew and his girlfriend, with whom the couple had gone to the festival, were among the victims.
In addition to these three hostages and the other two that Hamas released early in the morning, a sixth Israeli citizen, the Bedouin Hisham al-Sayed, will also be released this Saturday in the first phase of the ceasefire agreement that Hamas And Israel reached in January, in exchange for the release of 602 Palestinians held in Israeli arrests. Al-Sayed, whose release is scheduled for the city of Gaza without any public ceremony, is one of two of the six hostages that were 10 years under Hamas captivity.
