Five IDF female surveillance soldiers who were taken hostage during the Hamas onslaught on October 7, 2023, and released from Gaza captivity in January, have completed the intensive stage of their rehabilitation, Rabin Medical Center said Wednesday.
Liri Albag, Karina Ariev, Agam Berger, Daniella Gilboa and Naama Levy will now receive ongoing long-term monitoring, alongside community-based treatment, the hospital said.
The former hostages underwent various examinations and assessments, and based on the test results, each was to get a personalized long-term treatment plan.
Meanwhile, family members of hostages and dozens of activists held a march Wednesday evening to the Gaza Strip border to call for a deal to bring the remaining captives home and end the war.
The march departed from Kibbutz Be’eri, with participants walking on Route 232 until they reached the Re’im-area site of the Nova rave massacre.
An event was held there with several relatives of abductees calling on the government to avoid escalating the war, which they argued would endanger the captives, and instead sign a deal to bring them home.
“We said that military pressure doesn’t save hostages — it kills them,” said Ofir Braslavski, father of hostage Rom Braslavski.
“The government didn’t listen to us, and 42 hostages entered Gaza on their feet and came back in body bags. I don’t want my son to become number 43.
“My kid is hungry, thirsty, afraid, tortured, dying. And nobody has the right to sentence him to death — definitely not the one who abandoned him on October 7 and has continued to abandon him for almost two years,” he added, demanding that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sign a deal agreed to this week by the Hamas terror group.
Also Wednesday, Adi Alexander, father of former American-Israeli hostage Edan Alexander, spoke on the phone with Palestinian-American mediator Bishara Bahbah and thanked him for his involvement in the May release of his son, both parties on the call confirmed to The Times of Israel.
Bahbah operated a backchannel in the hostage talks over the past several months, passing along messages between US special envoy Steve Witkoff and senior Hamas officials, and playing a key role in Alexander’s release.
Hamas’s decision to free Alexander was framed as a goodwill gesture to US President Donald Trump’s administration that the terror group hoped would lead the US to coax Israel into ending the war in Gaza.
Terror groups in the Gaza Strip are still holding 50 hostages, including 49 of the 251 abducted by Hamas-led terrorists on October 7, 2023. Twenty are believed to be alive and there are grave concerns for the well-being of two others, with at least 28 confirmed dead by the IDF, Israeli officials have said. Hamas is also holding the body of an IDF soldier killed in Gaza in 2014.
Hamas released 30 hostages — 20 Israeli civilians, five soldiers, and five Thai nationals — and the bodies of eight slain Israeli captives during a ceasefire between January and March, before releasing Edan Alexander in May. The terror group freed 105 civilians during a weeklong truce in late November 2023, and four hostages were released before that in the early weeks of the war. In exchange, Israel has freed some 2,000 jailed Palestinian terrorists, security prisoners, and Gazan terror suspects detained during the war.
Eight hostages have been rescued from captivity by troops alive, and the bodies of 49 have also been recovered, including three mistakenly killed by the Israeli military as they tried to escape their captors, and the body of a soldier who was killed in 2014.
