«The government of Israel warmly welcomes the three freed women. Their families have been informed by the competent authorities that they have been released and have returned to our forces.” This was written by the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. «The government of Israel is committed to bringing home all hostages and missing persons. Romi Gonen (24 years old), Emily Damari (28 years old), Doron Steinbrecher (31 years old) were freed. The government, together with all security forces, will continue to support the released women and their families,” the statement reads. Joe Biden also celebrates the entry into force of the ceasefire in Gaza, which comes to a region, the Middle East, “profoundly transformed”. Hamas will no longer govern Gaza, Joe Biden said, stressing that the Hamas leader is “dead and Hamas’ sponsors in the Middle East have been weakened by Israel. “Hundreds of trucks” of aid are entering Gaza, Biden concluded.
Who are the three freed women?
Romi Gonen, 23 years oldwas last heard from at 10.58am on 7 October, as she and her friends tried to escape the Hamas assault on the Supernova festival. Gonen had been on the phone with her mother, Meirav Gonen, all morning since the terrorists began the attack at 6.30am. She was in the car with her friends when, at 10.15am, she told her mother that they had been hit and were bleeding. When the car was later found, it was empty. Romi’s phone was later located in Gaza.
Emily Damari, 27 years oldwas taken hostage that same morning during the assault on the Kfar Aza kibbutz. Damari has dual British-Israeli citizenship. His last message was at 10am when he wrote that terrorists were on his block shooting around his apartment. Bar Kislev, a friend who survived the massacre, later said he saw Damari’s car driven by a terrorist stop in front of his house and then quickly head towards Gaza. Of 37 residents of the “young generation” neighborhood of Kibbutz Kfar Aza, 11 were murdered and seven were kidnapped and taken to the Strip. In January 2024, former hostage Dafna Elyakim, 15, said that she and her younger sister had met Romy Gonen and Emily Damari in a Hamas tunnel.
Doron Steinbrecher, 31 years oldwas in his apartment on the same Kibbutz. A veterinary nurse, she was in contact with her married sister, Yamit Ashkenazi, and their parents, who all live on the kibbutz. At 6.30 in the morning Ashkenazi was with his family, including his children aged 3 and 6, in the safe room where they remained for 21 hours, without food or water. His parents were in their house in Kfar Aza, and their garden was used by the terrorists as a kind of headquarters without anyone ever attempting to enter the house. At 10.30am, Doron told her parents that she was scared and that terrorists had arrived at her building. Then she sent a voice message to her friends saying: “They’re here, they’ve got me.” Her father has always been very skeptical about the possibility of her being among the first to be released: “She is young and does not have dual citizenship,” he said. And yet this morning his name was at the top of the list.
But uncertainty remains about the conditions of all the abductees: according to Israeli security sources cited by Military Radio, of the 33 to be released in the first phase only 25 are believed to be alive. In addition to the three already mentioned and five female soldiers, among the women and children on the list there is also the 33-year-old Shiri Silberman Bibas and her children Ariel Bibas, 5, and her brother Kfir Bibas, 2, the youngest of the hostages whose death Hamas announced but which Israel never confirmed.
In exchange for the 33 hostages, Egypt said Israel would release more than 1,890 Palestinian prisoners. Among these, over 1,100 were captured in Gaza during the IDF offensive, Israeli media write. Another 737 are members of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Fatah movement detained in Israeli prisons, together with women and children. Among them is Zakaria Zubeidi, former leader of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, the armed wing of the Fatah party. Arrested in 2019 for taking part in shootings in the West Bank, he is believed to have been involved in numerous terrorist attacks, including an attack that killed six people in the Likud party’s Beit Shean branch in 2002, at the height of the Second Intifada. In September 2021, he and five Islamic Jihad members escaped from prison in northern Israel, before being rearrested days later.
Khalida Jarrar is also on the listPalestinian parliamentarian and leading member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, designated a terrorist organization by Israel, the United States and the EU. Three members of the so-called ‘Silwan Squadron’, a Hamas cell that carried out five attacks in Israel between March and June 2002, killing 35 people and wounding hundreds, will also be released.