Israel: Four Germans among released Hamas hostages

The hospitals have prepared well for their new patients. They cleared out and cordoned off entire wings for them, put up welcome signs and Israeli flags, and set up play areas. 13 Israeli hostages escaped the hell of Gaza this Friday afternoon. It is the first chapter of an exchange deal between the Israeli government and Hamas: 13 hostages for three times as many Palestinian prisoners. That’s the deal. In addition, thanks to a separate agreement brokered by Qatar and Egypt, ten Thai and one Filipino citizens were able to leave Gaza. Among the Israeli hostages are four with German passports: a mother and her two small children and a seriously ill elderly woman. A spokeswoman for the hostage families confirmed this in the evening star.

It is not known in what condition they will be flown back to freedom by military helicopter. But you don’t want to imagine what they had to go through in the clutches of the terrorists over the past 48 days. Not if you know the last video that showed Doron Asher, 34, and her daughters Raz, 4, and Aviv, 3, alive for the last time to date: It shows a woman being followed by a Hamas terrorist in the back of a car wants to put a kind of blindfold on pick-ups. She holds her hands protectively over her face while shouting Allahu Akbar. Next to her, frightened and hugged tightly, are her two children.

One family member is dead, one is still hidden in the depths of Gaza

With them Asher visited her mother in Nir Oz on October 7th, the day of the Feast of Tabernacles. A small kibbutz within sight of the Gaza Strip, famous for its pomegranate groves. When Hamas invaded, the family barricaded themselves in the shelter of the house. Asher called her husband Yoni. Then the connection broke off. Using her Google account, Yoni Asher tracked his wife’s cell phone shortly afterwards in Chan Yunis, in the south of the Gaza Strip. In mid-October, at a meeting of the hostage families with Chancellor Olaf Scholz in Tel Aviv, he said: “I am a father without a family. My whole world has been taken away from me.”

Now he has his family back. At least part of it. Because two members will not be coming back: Efrat, Doron’s 68-year-old mother, the grandmother of the two children, who was later found dead by the Israeli military in Nir Oz. Her partner Gadi, who voluntarily came out of the shelter on October 7th to work with the terrorists to negotiate is probably still in the depths of Gaza, under the control of Hamas.

Gadi’s ex-wife Margalit Moses, 77, is now back. Her father fled Nazi Germany to Israel in 1933. Throughout her life, the convinced leftist repeatedly traveled to Palestinian areas to advise and help farmers. She can also be seen on a video from October 7th, as a passenger of a terrorist, her right hand clinging to a walking stick. Moses is no longer able to stand well on his feet. She suffers from cancer and diabetes and urgently needs medication. This is probably why she is now one of the first of the 240 hostages to be released.

Now she is flown into a world that has little in common with the quiet, green life of happy days on Kibbutz Nir Oz – she is expected in one of six selected hospitals, shielded from the public. Only families, security forces and medical staff should be allowed access. Three of the clinics have large trauma centers, one specializes in victims of sexual violence and one in pediatric medicine. Teams of gynecologists, pediatricians, forensic pathologists and psychologists are ready. 24 hostages are free. But it will take a lot of time before they can have their normal lives back.