Shosh Bedrosian, a spokesperson for the Israeli prime minister’s office, told a press briefing on Sunday that Israel was “hours away from freeing all of our hostages.”
The briefing gave some other details on what is expected in the coming hours.
“We hope that our 20 living hostages will be handed over together at the same time to the Red Cross and transported in six to eight vehicles without any demonstration of health from Hamas,” Bedrosian said. “The hostages will be taken to forces inside Israeli-controlled areas of Gaza and then transferred to the Reim base in southern Israel, where they will then be reunited with their families.”
She added that the living hostages would be sent to three hospitals in Israel.
Regarding the handover of the remains of the deceased hostages, Bedrosian said that “once the Red Cross has handed over the remains of the deceased hostages to Israeli forces in the Israeli-controlled territories inside Gaza, they will hold a short ceremony in the Gaza Strip. During the handover, the coffins will be draped in Israeli flags and traditional Jewish memorial prayers for the dead will be recited. »
She said the remains would then be taken to a forensic institute in Israel for identification, after which, “in coordination with Jewish law and of course tradition, their families will be informed in an appropriate time frame to bury their loved ones in a timely manner.”
Some 2,000 Palestinian prisoners (250 serving life sentences and around 1,700 detained since October 7, 2023), she said, will be released once Israel confirms that all the hostages have crossed the border into Israel.
“And once we have that confirmation, we expect that the prisoners will already be on the buses. But once we receive the confirmation, they will have crossed the Israeli border, those buses will start and they will begin their journey,” Bedrosian said.
