Hamas and Israel are preparing to exchange more hostages for prisoners: direct updates

The Israelis are still eagerly awaiting the word of his wife, Sherry, and their two children, Ariel, now 5, and Kfir, who was 9 months old at the time of his arrest – the youngest hostage was transferred to Gaza. Last week, Daniel Hajari, a spokesman for an Israeli military, seemed to restore the public to commit the possibility of not appearing alive, Saying The army was “very concerned” for the mother and children.

Hamas claimed last year that Mrs. Pepas and her children were killed by an Israeli air strike, but Israeli officials never confirmed this. Several hostages in Gaza were killed by Israeli forces, who were accidentally shot or perhaps as a result of Israeli air strikes. The army also said some Civil hostages may have been killed by the Israeli forces, where they were kidnapped on the day of the October 7 attack.

“The twisted fact of hell,” said Yifat Zailler in the “Pepas family” through “a twisted fact of hell.” interview last year.

The family of four was among more than 180 Kibutz residents Nir OzAgricultural society in southern Israel, who were killed or kidnapped in the October 7 attack. Since then, the family has become faces of a national shock that has sparked a fierce Israeli war in Gaza aimed at eliminating Hamas, a killing of more than 47,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza health officials, who do not distinguish between fighters and civilians.

More than 1750 people in Israel were killed in the war, about 1,200 of them on the day of the October 7 attack, according to Israeli officials. Toll includes more than 890 members of the Israeli military forces.

For more than a year of waiting, the hostages and their supporters carried orange balloons and orange shirts wearing in honor of missing children and their ginger hair. They held great events to celebrate two first birthdays of Kafir, who have never celebrated the celebration of another of the families.

All other children who were seized in the October 7 attack were released in a previous stop deal.

Israeli officials have pressured Hamas negotiators in recent days for more clarity around Mrs. Pepas and her children, according to the Israeli media. As a civilian with children, they were expected to be released in the initial stages of the ceasefire deal, before the soldiers or men, if they were alive.

Mr. Pepas was kidnapped separately from his family.

In the early morning hours before his arrest, he sent a text message to his sister, Ovry Pipas-Levy, to tell her about the incoming missile fire, according to an interview with her He can, Israeli public broadcaster. Later, he wrote that the gunmen entered the camp. He told her a gun, but gunmen have automatic rifles.

Then he described scenes from the clashes on Kibbutz and his fear that his young children will not be able to maintain calm.

“It looks like the end,” he wrote at 9:10 am.

A video of the October 7 attack on Nir Oz revealed pictures of the militants who dig the front door of the Bibas family.

At some point before her brother was arrested, Mrs. Pipas Levy was told, just as he wrote and her parents he loved them. At 9:45 am, he wrote: “They are in.”

Mrs. Pepas Levy told him that the first to know the kidnapping of her brother on October 7 when she saw a video of the gunmen kidnapped him a few days later.

In November 2023, shortly after Hamas said that Mrs. Pepas and her children were killed by the Israeli bombing, the group released a video of Mr. Pipas, who told his wife and children killed, as crying collapsed.

The pictures of the Bibas family were moved in the Israeli soul throughout the crisis. They were on the first page of the country’s most popular daily newspapers, Yedioth Ahronoth, under the title “Mother and Little Souls, led to the dark.”

Throughout the country, writing on the walls depicting the family appeared in the streets. Some KFIR who has a pink elephant appears, as in the image used in a hostage sticker. Others appear to reunite the Pepas family, which illuminates Hanuka Menora.

“I know they have become a symbol,” Mrs. Pipas Levy said at a press conference last February. “But for us, it is our family, and we want to return.”

Jonatan Reese and Matthew Makk Beige The reports contributed.