Live Updates: Hamas Releases 3 More Hostages in Exchange With Israel

Hamas was set to release three more hostages — including a U.S. citizen on Saturday — as part of its cease-fire deal with Israel, after the previous handover descended into chaos.
Hamas named the three as Yarden Bibas, 35, Ofer Kalderon, 54, and Keith Siegel, 65, an American Israeli. Israel is slated to release about 90 Palestinian prisoners in exchange, according to a Hamas-linked prisoners’ information center.
The three were abducted during the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, when Hamas and its allies killed roughly 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took about 250 hostage, according to the Israeli authorities, setting off the war in Gaza. Israel’s subsequent military campaign against Hamas in Gaza has lasted for over a year and killed more than 45,000 people, according to local health officials.
The exchange would be the fourth in a multiphase cease-fire deal that Israel and Hamas agreed to last month. Under the deal, Hamas pledged to free at least 33 of the 97 remaining hostages over the first six weeks in exchange for more than 1,500 Palestinians jailed by Israel.
On Thursday, Hamas freed three Israelis and five Thai nationals in exchange for more than 100 Palestinians. But the armed group struggled to control crowds of people trying to catch a glimpse of the hostages held captive during 15 months of war, angering Israel and delaying the prisoner release.
Here’s what else to know:
-
Rafah crossing: The first group of Gazans was expected to leave on Saturday through the border with Egypt. The crossing is reopening to allow sick and wounded Palestinians to leave, a stipulation of the cease-fire deal. Israel committed to allowing up to 50 sick and wounded Palestinian fighters to leave through Rafah per day, in addition to Palestinian women and children who need medical care.
-
Hostage releases: About 10 Israeli captives have been freed under the current cease-fire, in addition to the Thai workers who were taken hostage while working in Israeli villages near the Gaza border. Israel has released more than 300 Palestinian prisoners, including many who were serving life sentences for involvement in deadly attacks against Israelis.
-
A national trauma: For many Israelis, the abduction of Mr. Bibas and his family has become emblematic of the cruelty of the Hamas-led attack. Militants also abducted his wife, Shiri Bibas, and their two children, Ariel, who was 4, and Kfir, who was 9 months old, but their fates are not clear.
The Red Cross convoy is leaving the scene carrying the two Israeli hostages. The entire exchange took only a few minutes. Thursday’s release in Khan Younis dragged on as the hostages — surrounded by Palestinian fighters — had to make their way through a huge crowd pushing for a glimpse of the captives.
Men who appear to be Ofer Kalderon and Yarden Bibas — two of the three Israeli hostages expected to be freed today — have been marched through a short ceremony by Hamas fighters on the stage in Khan Younis in southern Gaza. They are now being handed over to the International Committee for the Red Cross, whose officials will drive them to Israeli forces waiting to receive them inside the Gaza Strip.
Hamas has been conducting tightly choreographed hostage releases as part of the exchanges, in part as an attempt to showcase the militant group’s power in Gaza despite 15 months of war. Their fighters often direct the hostages to wave at the crowd, or at least a waiting camera held by a masked Hamas member. The heavily edited footage is later released for propaganda purposes.
Rawan Sheikh Ahmad
A hostage who appears to be Yarden Bibas was seen being transferred to the Red Cross in Khan Younis, in southern Gaza, according to live footage from the scene.
Hamas fighters are bringing one of the Israeli hostages — who appears to be Ofer Kalderon — onto a makeshift stage in the city of Khan Younis. On the stage is a banner with the slogan “Zionism will not prevail” in Hebrew. The area around the stage is relatively empty save for Hamas gunmen — a far cry from the chaotic scenes on Thursday in southern Gaza, where hundreds of people formed a mob around seven Israeli and Thai hostages there.
Rawan Sheikh Ahmad
Gazans have begun gathering in Khan Younis. Footage from the scene shows Red Cross vehicles amid a heavy presence of Hamas fighters.
In footage streamed by Al Jazeera, Hamas fighters can be seen gathering in Gaza City to prepare for the next hostage release. Some are bearing pictures of Mohammad Deif, the Hamas military commander killed by Israel last year. The three hostages expected to be released today appear set to be freed from at least two different places inside the Gaza Strip.
Image
They became a potent symbol of Israel’s hostage crisis after video from the Hamas-led 2023 attack showed Palestinian militants leading away a distraught mother clutching her two small red-haired sons. Another video showed the father of the same family being spirited away to Gaza on a motorcycle, his head bloodied.
On Friday, Hamas said the 35-year-old father, Yarden Bibas, will be one of three male hostages to be freed on Saturday.
Israelis are still anxiously awaiting word of his wife, Shiri, and their two children, Ariel, now 5, and Kfir, who was 9 months old at the time of his capture — the youngest hostage taken into Gaza. Last week, Daniel Hagari, an Israeli military spokesman, seemed to brace the public for the likelihood that they would not come out alive, saying the military was “gravely concerned” for the mother and children.
Hamas claimed last year that Ms. Bibas and her children had been killed by an Israeli airstrike, but Israeli officials have never confirmed that. Several hostages were killed in Gaza by Israeli forces, accidentally shot or possibly as a result of Israeli airstrikes. The military has also said some civilian hostages may have been killed by Israeli forces as they were being kidnapped on the day of the Oct. 7 attack.
The Bibas family has been through “a twisted reality from hell,” a relative, Yifat Zailer, said in an interview last year.
Image
The family of four were among more than 180 residents of kibbutz Nir Oz, a farming community in southern Israel, who were killed or abducted in the Oct. 7 attack. Since then, the family became the faces of a national trauma that sparked a fierce Israeli war in Gaza aimed at eradicating Hamas, an onslaught that has killed more than 47,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza health officials, who do not distinguish between combatants and civilians.
More than 1,750 people in Israel have been killed in the war, about 1,200 of them on the day of the Oct. 7 attack, according to Israeli officials. The toll includes more than 890 members of the Israeli military forces.
Throughout more than a year of waiting, hostage families and their supporters have carried orange balloons and worn orange shirts in honor of the missing children and their ginger-colored hair. They have held large events to mark the first two birthdays of Kfir, who has never celebrated one out of captivity.
All other children seized in the Oct. 7 attack were released in a previous cease-fire deal.
Israeli officials pressed Hamas negotiators in recent days for more clarity on Ms. Bibas and her children, according to Israeli media. As a female civilian with children, they were expected to be released in the initial stages of the cease-fire deal, before soldiers or men, if they were alive.
Mr. Bibas was abducted separately from his family.
In the early morning hours before his capture, he texted his sister, Ofri Bibas-Levy, to tell her about incoming rocket fire, according to an interview she gave to Kan, the Israeli public broadcaster. Later, he texted her that militants had entered the camp. He had a gun, he told her, but the militants had automatic rifles.
He then described scenes of clashes on the kibbutz and his fear that his two young sons would not be able to keep quiet.
“It feels like the end,” he wrote her at 9:10 in the morning.
Video from the Oct. 7 attack on Nir Oz revealed images of militants drilling open the Bibas family’s front door.
Sometime before her brother was captured, Ms. Bibas-Levy told Kan, he texted her and their parents that he loved them. At 9:45 in the morning, he wrote: “They’re in.”
Ms. Bibas-Levy told Kan that the first she learned of her brother’s Oct. 7 kidnapping when she saw a video of militants abducting him a few days later.
Image
In November 2023, not long after Hamas said Ms. Bibas and her children were killed by Israeli bombing, the group released a video of Mr. Bibas being told his wife and children had been killed, as he broke down crying.
Images of the Bibas family have been seared into the Israeli psyche throughout the crisis. They were on the front page of one of the country’s most popular daily newspapers, Yedioth Ahronoth, under the headline “A Mother and Two Small Souls, Led Into the Darkness.”
And across the country, graffiti depicting the family has appeared on the streets. Some show baby Kfir holding a pink elephant, as in the photo used for his hostage poster. Others show an imagined reunion of the Bibas family, lighting a Hanukkah menorah.
“I know they became a symbol,” Ms. Bibas-Levy said in a tearful news conference last February. “But for us, it’s our family, and we want them back.”
Johnatan Reiss and Matthew Mpoke Bigg contributed reporting.