Soon after her release from more than 470 days of captivity in Gaza, Emily Damari entered Sheba Medical Center, near Tel Aviv, wrapped in a large Israeli flag and smiling, video footage showed.
In a photograph released by the Israeli military, the 28-year-old flashed a kind of V-sign with a bandaged left hand — a “rock on” hand gesture made up of her index and little fingers because she lost the others to a gunshot wound in the Hamas-led attack on Israel.
And on Monday morning, Ms. Damari posted on Instagram thanking God, her family and friends, and saying, “I have returned to life” and was “the happiest person in the world.”
Ms. Damari was freed Sunday along with Romi Gonen, 24, and Doron Steinbrecher, 31, all of them kidnapped during the Hamas-led assault on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, in which an estimated 1,200 people were killed.
Video released by the Israeli military showed the three hostages being reunited with their families in emotional scenes, and Israeli news anchors openly expressed their relief as the first images emerged from Gaza and they were seen entering a Red Cross vehicle unaided.
But while the early scenes captured on video and in photographs were ones of elation, much is unknown about the women’s conditions.
The Israeli health ministry and Sheba Medical Center, where the three women are staying in a closed wing with family, have provided little information about the conditions of the women, saying in statements that their primary commitment was to safeguard the privacy of the returnees while they receive medical and psychological care.
In brief statements on Sunday night, two doctors at Sheba hospital suggested that the women were not in immediate need of emergency treatment.
“I’m happy to report that they are in stable condition,” said Prof. Itai Pessach, adding, “That allows us, and them, to focus on what is the most important thing for now — reuniting with their families.”
Sheba Medical Center has been the first stop for dozens of captives who were seized in the October assault and later freed, including many of those released in an exchange of hostages for Palestinian prisoners in November 2023, as well as the four hostages rescued in an audacious and deadly Israeli military raid in June 2024.
Professor Pessach, who has led the Sheba medical team for returning hostages, cautioned in an interview in June that first impressions can be deceptive.
“The thing I definitely know is to expect the unexpected,” he said then, after receiving the four hostages who were rescued. “After eight months,” he said, “we had a notion that they’d be much more broken, maybe look differently than they were.”
They had lost less weight than had been expected, he said. But then, he said, the results from medical tests start coming in, along with initial psychological evaluations, and “you start to grasp what they’ve been through.”
All four had come back suffering from severe malnutrition, Dr. Pessach said, adding that the lack of sunlight, abuse and psychological stress they had endured would have long-term implications for their health.
“As wonderful as it is to see Emily’s resilience, these are still early days,” Mandy Damari, Emily’s mother, acknowledged in a statement on Monday, in which she noted that Emily was “doing much better than any of us could ever have anticipated.”
In a recent television interview, Yamit Ashkenazi, Ms. Steinbrecher’s sister, said she was expecting to receive “a different Doron.” Ms. Ashkenazi also worried about telling her sister that so many of her friends were killed in the Hamas attack.
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