Hamas released three more hostages on Saturday as part of its cease-fire deal with Israel, in a quick process that was a stark contrast to a chaotic handover earlier this week.
The hostage release is part of a 42-day cease-fire deal that went into effect last month, pausing the fighting between Israel and Hamas. Hamas agreed to incrementally release 33 of the nearly 100 remaining hostages in exchange for more than 1,000 Palestinians jailed by Israel and a partial Israeli withdrawal.
Here’s a closer look at the Israelis released on Saturday.
Yarden Bibas
For many Israelis, the abduction of Mr. Bibas and his family has become emblematic of the cruelty of the 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel. Militants also abducted his wife, Shiri, and their two children, Ariel, 4, and Kfir, who was 9 months old at the time, from their home in Kibbutz Nir Oz.
Hamas later said Ms. Bibas and the two children had been killed in an Israeli airstrike. Israeli officials have not publicly confirmed the claim but have warned that they are gravely concerned for their fates.
A video of Ms. Bibas being marched through the kibbutz by a Hamas militant with her two children on Oct. 7, 2023, captured her terror. They were imprisoned separately from Mr. Bibas. In November 2023, Hamas posted a video showing him being told that they had died in captivity.
The Bibas family has struggled with not knowing whether their loved ones are alive. The last time any of them received proof of life for Mr. Bibas was when images that showed him bleeding from the head circulated online.
Ofri Bibas-Levy, Mr. Bibas’s sister who has been advocating a cease-fire and hostage deal, said she was grateful for the attention of the news media and world leaders. But the haunting images of Shiri and her children have turned them into symbols of the crisis and generated a degree of public fascination about their fate that was sometimes rattling, she said.
“People attach their names to any new story that pops up, even if it is made up,” she said at a gathering of relatives of hostages near the residence of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel in Jerusalem to renew calls for an urgent deal to bring them home. “And every time that happens, it shakes our whole world.”
Mr. Kalderon, a French Israeli who was 52 at the time of the Hamas attack, was captured with two of his four children, Erez and Sahar, 12 and 16 at the time. They had fled from their shelter in Kibbutz Nir Oz in southern Israel into nearby fields, according to Israeli media. The children were released in the November 2023 cease-fire deal.
In October of 2024, more than a year after Mr. Kalderon was taken hostage, his cousin Ifat Kalderon was part of a group of relatives of hostages who issued a sharply worded televised statement to Mr. Netanyahu. They called on the prime minister to seize the moment after the killing of the Hamas leader, Yahya Sinwar, the architect of the Oct. 7 attack, to reach a hostage and cease-fire deal.
“We all understand there is a narrow window of opportunity — and maybe the last — to save lives,” she said. The next month, his family marked his second birthday in captivity.
Mr. Siegel, an American Israeli, was 64 when he was taken captive with his wife, Aviva Siegel, from their home in Kfar Azza and driven, along with a neighbor and her two children, into Gaza in their own car, according to Israeli media reports. He was raised in North Carolina and moved to Israel as an adult.
Ms. Siegel was released in late November 2023in the first cease-fire deal. No word was heard from Mr. Siegel until Hamas released a video of him and another hostage in April of last year.
Ms. Siegel told The New York Times in May that she and her husband had been moved more than a dozen times and kept in apartments and tunnels. She said they were often denied food and water for many hours. She said her captors abused and humiliated the hostages and did not permit them to speak.
Ms. Siegel said she often thought about her last conversation with her husband before she was freed: “I asked Keith to be strong for me, and I said, ‘I’ll be strong for you’ — and that’s what’s keeping me alive.”
