British hostage Emily Damari will be released as part of the deal between Israel and Hamas, Israeli media reports.
The 28-year-old has been held in Gaza since she was shot in the hand and leg when snatched from her home in southern Israel during the October 7 attack by Hamas.
Under a deal finally agreed this week, 33 hostages are expected to be released, including women, ‘children, elderly people, as well as civilian ill people and wounded’.
A list of names circulating on Israeli media includes men, women and children. Hamas has not indicated their condition.
Israel’s security cabinet will meet to vote on a Gaza ceasefire and hostage release deal today, with the expectation a truce could come into effect as soon as Sunday.
The deal is expected to pass despite backlash from hard-right members of the coalition, who say Hamas must be fully vanquished before a deal is made.
Hostages are expected to be released on Sunday from 4pm if the agreement passes.
Emily was in her own flat in the kibbutz when Hamas led an incursion into southern Israel, killing some 1,170 people and taking 251 hostage.
Hostages released in the November 2023 truce told her mother, Mandy, how her daughter showed ‘bravery and courage’, singing ‘It’s a Great Morning’ every morning ‘despite the darkness’.
Ms Damari spoke at the official anniversary event commemorating the October 7 massacre in Hyde Park, London a year after Hamas’ deadly incursion, addressing a large crowd who had turned out in support.
Speaking publicly for the first time about her daughter, she said that she felt like her daughter had been ‘forgotten’ in captivity.
For more than a year, protestors have gathered in Israel and around the world to call for favourable terms to a deal that would see the release of hostages remaining in Gaza.
Some 94 are believed to still be in the beleaguered Palestinian enclave, including the 34 the Israeli military says are dead.
The deal under review by the Israeli security cabinet is the closest the hostages have come to a deal for their collective release since the November 2023 truce.
If approved, it could set the tone for a move towards the terms for a permanent end to the war after 15 months of conflict.
The list of hostages due to be released as soon as Sunday includes Oded Lifschitz, an 84-year-old Israeli with family in Britain.
Daughter Sharone Lifschitz told the BBC from her east London home this week that she hoped her father was still alive.
‘Miracles do happen,’ she said.
Eli Sharabi was also named on the list. Stephen Brisley, his brother-in-law, said he hoped he could be freed in the deal.
‘I’ve thought so hard about how I would feel at this moment but now it’s happening I don’t know what to feel,’ he told the broadcaster.
Under the terms of the deal, Israeli forces will be expected to withdraw from Gaza’s densely populated areas and begin an initial 42-day ceasefire.
In return, hundreds of Palestinian prisoners will be able to return to what is left of their homes.
U.S. President Joe Biden said the deal would ‘surge much-needed humanitarian assistance to Palestinian civilians and reunite the hostages with their families’.
The United Nations estimates that the deadly war has littered Gaza with over 50 million tons of rubble, roughly 12 times the size of the Great Pyramid of Giza.
More than 46,000 Palestinians have been killed in the conflict, according to local health officials.
Israeli prime minister’s office said late this morning, after hours of uncertainty over the timing of final cabinet approval of the deal, that the deal is expected to go ahead as scheduled on Sunday.
‘Pending approval by the Security Cabinet and the Government, and the agreement taking effect, the release of the hostages will be implemented according to the planned framework in which the hostages are expected to be released on Sunday,’ it said in a statement.
The ceasefire, due to begin Sunday after more than a year of war, would take effect on the eve of Donald Trump’s inauguration as president of the United States.
