Hamas terrorist who held Emily Damari hostage said killed in IDF strike

Israel recently killed one of the Hamas terrorists who held British-Israeli hostage Emily Damari captive in Gaza, according to a Sunday report.

Channel 12 named the terrorist as Hazem Naim, but did not provide further details, including when the strike was carried out.

Damari said she shouted “screams of joy” when she heard the news.

“He was responsible for me and [fellow freed captive] Romi [Gonen] for around eight months,” Damari told the Channel 12 news network. “He was the commander of our captors, a very, very evil person.”

Thanking the IDF for its tireless efforts, Damari added: “People will never understand what that monster was to me and to Romi.” She noted that, at the same time, she was “scared to death” for her friends who are still held hostage, including twins Ziv and Gali Berman.

In July, the Israel Defense Forces announced that the previous month, it killed a different Hamas terrorist who held Damari in his home.

Nasr Ali Quneita, who was targeted in Gaza City on June 19, was said by the IDF to be a member of Hamas’s military intelligence unit in the Sheikh Radwan Battalion, known in the IDF as the al-Furqan Battalion, and that he invaded Israel on October 7, 2023, and held Damari hostage in his home at the start of the war.

At the time, Damari responded to her captor’s death, writing on social media: “This is what the face of evil looks like. A face I will never forget. I’m so glad he is no longer [in] our world.”

Damari was kidnapped from Kibbutz Kfar Aza during the Hamas onslaught of October 7, 2023. She was abducted alongside Ziv Berman, her neighbor, who rushed over to her home to make sure she was safe. Invading terrorists shot Damari in her left hand, and another bullet was lodged in her right leg after fatally hitting her dog Choocha in the head.

Ziv Berman and his twin brother, Gali Berman, are still held hostage in Gaza.

Damari was released in January 2025 as part of a hostage release and ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas.

Terror groups in the Gaza Strip are still holding 48 hostages, including 47 of the 251 abducted by Hamas-led terrorists on October 7, 2023. They include the bodies of at least 26 confirmed dead by the IDF. Twenty are believed to be alive and there are grave concerns for the well-being of two others, 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, and one additional hostage, a dual American-Israeli citizen, in May as a “gesture” to the United States. 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 51 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.