Israeli hostage handover is under way in Gaza, Palestinian official says
Relatives of the Bibas family said they had been informed of the Hamas report.
“We are waiting for the information to be confirmed and hopefully refuted by military officials,” a statement from the Hostages and Missing Persons Families Forum said.
The Israeli military said two Israeli-Russian hostages were freed on Nov 29 in a move it said was additional to the scheduled releases, and were with Israeli special forces inside Israeli territory. After the two undergo an initial medical assessment, IDF soldiers will accompany them to hospitals to be reunited with their families, it said.
The two were named by the Israeli government as Yelena Trupanov, 50, and Irena Tati, 73, and they were released under a separate agreement between Hamas and Russia, Israeli officials said.
The hostages are among some 240 people seized by Hamas gunmen during a rampage into southern Israel on Oct 7 in which they killed 1,200 people. Israel’s bombardment of Gaza in retaliation has killed more than 15,000 Gazans, according to health authorities in the Palestinian enclave.
Two Palestinian officials told Reuters that talks were continuing over a possible extension of the truce, which is scheduled to expire early on Nov 30, but no agreement had yet been reached.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, speaking in Brussels on Nov 28, said he would work with the Israelis during a trip there in the coming days to see if the temporary ceasefire could be extended.
An Israeli official said earlier it would be impossible to extend the ceasefire without a commitment to release all women and children among the hostages. The official said Israel believed that militants were still holding enough women and children to prolong the truce by two to three days.
A Palestinian official said negotiators were hammering out whether Israeli men would be released on different terms than the exchange of three Palestinian detainees for each Israeli hostage that has applied to the women and children.