Hamas confirms names of Israeli hostages to be released in exchange for 602 Palestinian prisoners

Israel has received a confirmed list from Hamas naming six Israeli hostages set to be released from Gaza tomorrow.

The Prime Minister’s Office confirmed that the hostages' families have been notified, Caliber.Az reports citing Israeli media and urged the public to avoid spreading unverified information.

Hamas earlier identified the hostages as Tal Shoham, Omer Shem-Tov, Eliya Cohen, Omer Wenkert, Avera Mengistu, and Hisham al-Sayed. Their names were made public earlier this week after their families were informed.

Mengistu and al-Sayed have been held in Gaza for over a decade after crossing into the Strip voluntarily and are suspected to be suffering from mental illnesses, while the other four were kidnapped on October 7, 2023.

Meanwhile, the Palestinian Prisoners’ Club reports that Israel will release atleast 602 prisoners tomorrow as part of the ongoing hostage-ceasefire deal with Hamas.

As reported by Israeli media outlets, a spokesperson for the NGO told French media that the released prisoners include 445 individuals from Gaza arrested after Hamas’s October 7 attack, 60 that have been serving long sentences, 50 serving life terms, and 47 re-arrested after the 2011 prisoner swap for IDF soldier Gilad Shalit.

Hebrew media reported last night that seven prisoners slated for release outside Israel, which are those that Israel deems as too risky, opted to remain incarcerated and were replaced by seven others from the eligible list.

The announcement came a day after Hamas, for the first time, returned the remains of three slain Israeli hostages: Oded Lifshitz (83) and brothers Ariel (4) and Kfir Bibas (8 months). Forensic analysis suggested that the children were "brutally murdered" in November 2023, which refutes previous claims by the extremist Salafi organization Al-Mujahedeen, a radical Islamist group operating in Gaza alongside Hamas who had kidnapped the family from their homes in Israel, that they were killed during an IDF air strike.

In a shocking twist of events, the Israeli military announced that the forensic team was unable to identify the fourth body returned by Hamas, which they claimed was the children's' mother Shiri Silberman Bibas. The IDF announced in the early hours of February 21 that the returned remains were most probably those of an unidentified Gazan woman, as they could not match the body to any other Israeli hostage still in captivity. 

The revelation followed a Hamas-led propaganda ceremony with music and macabre slogans accompanying the return of the remains, triggering outrage and mourning across Israel and worldwide. Yarden Bibas, the children's father and husband of still missing Shiri Silberman Bibas had also been taken hostage on October 7, 2023 but kept seperately from his family in Gaza. He has been released this year in a previous exchange.

By Nazrin Sadigova