Dual UK-Israel citizen Emily Damari released from Gaza after 471 days in captivity
27-year-old abducted with friends from Kibbutz Kfar Aza on October 7. She was returned to Israel in phase 1 of a hostage release-ceasefire deal on January 19, 2025
On January 19, 2025, hostages Romi Gonen, Emily Damari, and Doron Steinbrecher crossed the border from the Gaza Strip into Israel, after 471 days in Hamas captivity. Below is an initial report of Damari’s capture.
Emily Damari, 27 (now 28), was taken hostage on October 7 by Hamas terrorists who attacked Kibbutz Kfar Aza, killing, assaulting and abducting dozens to Gaza.
Damari is a British-Israeli dual citizen whose last message was around 10 a.m. on October 7, when she wrote that terrorists were in her neighborhood and shooting around her apartment.
Bar Kislev, a friend from the same neighborhood who survived that black Shabbat, later reported in a Channel 12 interview that he saw Damari’s car being driven at around 11 a.m. in their neighborhood.
He watched the car, which was being driven by a terrorist, stop in front of his house, and heard arguments in Arabic before the car was reversed and driven quickly in the direction of Gaza.
He said he believed that was the moment when Damari and the Berman twins, Gali and Ziv, were abducted. He witnessed other abductions, all within a one-hour window,
Out of 37 residents of Kibbutz Kfar Aza’s “young generation” neighborhood, 11 people were murdered and seven were kidnapped and taken to the Strip — among the 1,200 who were killed and 253 kidnapped when gunmen rampaged through southern Israeli communities.
In January 2024, released hostage Dafna Elyakim, 15, said in an Israeli television interview that she and her younger sister, Ella Elyakim, were taken into Hamas’s underground tunnels, where they met five other female hostages — Liri Albag, Naama Levy, Romy Gonen, Agam Berger and Emily Damari.
The Times of Israel Community.