The Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, released a video on Saturday, featuring an Israeli hostage who has been held in Gaza since the October 2023 attack.
According to AFP, in the undated three-and-a-half-minute long unverified video, 19-year-old soldier Liri Albag spoke in Hebrew for the Israeli government to secure her release. The Hostages and Missing Families Forum, a campaign group for relatives of those abducted, said Albag’s family has not authorised the publication of the video.
Jerusalem:
The armed wing of Hamas, the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, released a video on Saturday of an Israeli hostage held in Gaza since its October 2023 attack.In the undated, three-and-a-half-minute video recording that AFP has not been able to verify, 19-year-old soldier… pic.twitter.com/qjyxG3s6cF
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In a statement, her family appealed to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other world leaders to make a decision as if these were their children. Liri Albag was 18 when she was captured by the militants at Nahal Oz base on the Gaza border along with six other women conscripts, five of whom still remain in captivity.
During the October 2023 attack, took 251 people hostage, of whom 96 remain in Gaza. The Israeli military says 34 of those are dead.
Hamas and its ally Islamic Jihad have released several videos of Israeli hostages in their custody during nearly 15 months of fighting in Gaza.
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Last year, Liri’s father, Eli Albag, was one of four relatives of hostages who travelled to London to urge the UK Government to pressurise Qatar, which is involved in negotiations for the hostages’ release and also hosts several senior Hamas leaders. They said they want the Gulf state to choose whether it wants to continue to host Hamas or be “part of Western civilisation”.
Albag told BBC, that Liri is his youngest daughter, the “happiest, who liked music, who liked to dance” and who had “friends all over the world”.
On Saturday, during the weekly demonstration in Tel Aviv organised by the hostages’ forum, they kept up the pressure on Netanyahu for a deal to free the hostages. The prime minister’s critics in Israel have accused him of stalling on a deal.
The forum said the latest video was “firm and incontestable proof of the urgency of bringing the hostages home”.
