Siegel, along with Ofer Kalderon and Yarden Bibas, are set to be released Saturday, after 484 days in captivity. In exchange, Israel is expected to release another group of Palestinian prisoners and detainees. American Israeli Keith Siegel is among the hostages set to be released Saturday, Hamas said statement Friday, as part of the fourth hostage-prisoner exchange with Israel. Yarden Bibas and Ofer Kalderon will also be released, according to Hamas' statement. Siegel, 65, was last seen in a video released by Hamas in April, where he spoke directly to his family to say he was doing OK. Originally from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Siegel was taken from kibbutz Kfar Aza in southern Israel during Hamas' Oct. 7, 2023, attack in which some 250 people were kidnapped and about 1,200 killed. Bibas was abducted along with his wife, Shiri, and their two sons, Kfir, who was 9 months old at the time and would have turned 2 this month, and Ariel, now 5. During a one-week ceasefire in November 2023 when 105 hostages were released, the Bibas children did not emerge out of Gaza, unlike other child hostages. It’s unknown if the Bibas children and their mother are still alive. Hamas said during that ceasefire that Shiri Bibas and the two children had been killed in an Israeli airstrike, but the Israeli military said the claims could not be confirmed. In February 2024, the Israel Defense Forces acknowledged its fears for the family. "Based on the information available to us, we are very concerned and worried about the condition and well-being of Shiri and the children,” Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, the Israel Defense Forces' chief spokesperson, said in a news conference. Ofer Kalderon, now 54, was kidnapped with 17-year-old daughter Sahar and 12-year-old son Erez. Both children were released in November 2023. "To get him back has been the one thing that has been the missing piece of their puzzle of recovery," Kalderon's cousin, Jason Greenberg, told NBC Boston. Soon after Siegel's video, his two daughters, Ilan and Shir, shared a picture of them holding hands with their mother, Aviva Siegel, who was also taken hostage on Oct. 7 but released a month later.“Keith and I nearly died in the tunnel because there was no oxygen, and I’ve been talking about it over and over and over — hard stories. But I want to just tell everybody we’re not going to stop,” she told NBC News' Lester Holt in an interview alongside others whose loved ones were also taken. Apart from Siegel, two more Americans are believed to be still alive in Gaza: Sagui Dekel-Chen, 36, and Edan Alexander, 20. The bodies of four Americans — Itay Chen, 19; Omer Neutra, 21; and the married couple Judith Weinstein, 70, and Gadi Haggai, 73 — who were most likely killed on Oct. 7, 2023, are still being held in Gaza. Israel is expected to release another group of Palestinian prisoners in exchange for the three hostages Saturday.

Five Thai nationals held hostage by Hamas since its Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel were released Thursday. They were among 31 Thais taken by the militant group, of whom 23 have already been released. Another two have been confirmed dead, and the status of one remaining person is not clear. According to Thailand’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 46 Thais have been killed during the conflict, including the two who died in Hamas captivity. They were among tens of thousands of Thai workers in Israel. Israel once relied heavily on Palestinian workers, but it started bringing in large numbers of migrant workers after the 1987-93 Palestinian revolt known as the first Intifada. Most came from Thailand, and Thais remain the largest group of foreign agricultural laborers in Israel today, earning considerably more than they can at home. Thailand and Israel implemented a bilateral agreement a decade ago to ease the way for workers in the agriculture sector. Israel has come under criticism for the conditions under which the Thai farm laborers work. In a 2015 report, Human Rights Watch said they often were housed in makeshift and inadequate accommodations and “were paid salaries significantly below the legal minimum wage, forced to work long hours in excess of the legal maximum, subjected to unsafe working conditions and denied their right to change employers.” A watchdog group found more recently that most were still paid below the legal minimum wage. There were about 30,000 Thai workers, primarily working on farms, in Israel prior to the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas. In the wake of the attack, some 7,000 returned home, primarily on government evacuation flights, but higher wages have continued to attract new arrivals. Thai ambassador to Israel Pannabha Chandraramya said Thursday that there are now more than 38,000 Thai workers in the country. Faced with a labor shortage in the wake of the exodus after the Hamas attack, Israel’s Agriculture Ministry announced incentives to try and attract foreign workers back to evacuated areas. Among other things, it offered to extend work visas and to pay bonuses of about $500 a month. Thailand’s Labor Ministry granted 3,966 Thai workers permission to work in Israel in 2024, keeping Israel in the top four destinations for Thais working abroad last year. Thai migrant workers generally come from poorer regions of the country, especially the northeast, and even before the bonuses the jobs in Israel paid many times what they could make at home.

Sama al-Qudra, her father and her brother were killed by shrapnel from an Israeli airstrike shortly after the ceasefire was supposed to go into effect. JERUSALEM — As Ahmed al-Qudra set off to see what — if anything — remained of his family’s home in the village of al-Qarara, he believed the long-awaited ceasefire in Gaza had begun. So at around 9 a.m. on Sunday, Jan. 19, he began walking north through the city of Khan Younis with his seven children, including his oldest son, Adli, 16, and his youngest daughter, Sama, 6. It would prove to be a fatal mistake. Unbeknownst to him and his family, the ceasefire — due to start that morning at 8:30 a.m. — had been delayed. Hamas had not provided the names of the first hostages it planned to free that afternoon, so Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered airstrikes to continue. As the al-Qudras approached El Bareer Street, one of Khan Younis' main roads, an Israeli aircraft attacked a passing Palestinian police vehicle. The Israeli military said in a statement at the time that it was hitting “terror targets.” But the blast also sent shrapnel tearing into the al-Qudra family. Video verified by NBC News shows Ahmed’s body lying in the street alongside Adli's, as several of the smaller children scream for their father, shortly after the strike at around 9:30 a.m. By the time the truce finally began at 11:15 a.m., Sama had been declared dead. She was the last child killed in Gaza before the ceasefire, a spokesperson at Nasser Hospital told NBC News. “This is their fate,” Sama’s mother, Hanan, 31, told NBC News last week, of the death of her husband, son and daughter. After Sama’s small body was brought to Nasser Hospital, she was laid out briefly on a metal tray — barefoot and wearing a pink sweater — before being wrapped in a traditional Islamic burial shroud. Adli lay next to her. That morning the children “were jumping with joy” at the prospect of returning home, Hanan said, adding that she was in the market shopping for food when she heard the explosion and rushed to the hospital, praying her family wasn’t involved. Instead she would find her husband, son and daughter were among the last of more than 47,000 people killed in Gaza since the start of the war on Oct. 7, 2023, according to health officials in the enclave. Before the war, Hanan said the family of nine had struggled financially but found happiness in their home in al-Qarara. Sama would sometimes daydream aloud about her wedding day, asking what dress she would wear, Hanan said. But the family was left displaced and destitute after the fighting started, she said, adding that the children often went hungry. “Their father and I would cry at night when we put our heads on the pillow because they wanted to eat,” she said. The war took an especially hard toll on Sama, Hanan said. She shared a video with NBC News showing three of her daughters walking down a dusty road carrying yellow plastic jerry cans to collect water. Sama struggles to keep up with the older girls, wiping sweat and dust from her eyes as she approaches the camera. “She had been asking for more than two months to eat a banana,” Hanan said. “I took her and bought her a small banana. She wanted pizza, so I bought her a small piece for 2 shekels (55 cents). I told her to eat it in the street so that her siblings wouldn’t know.” “I was afraid they might die wanting something they couldn’t have,” she added. The Israeli strike that killed Sama occurred on President Joe Biden’s last full day in office, and such attacks were a source of ongoing tension between his administration and Netanyahu’s government. The police in Gaza fall under the Hamas-controlled Interior Ministry, and enforce laws set by the militant group after it took control of the Strip in 2007. Israel considers members of the police force to be Hamas terrorists and legitimate military targets, even though some officers also carry out more mundane duties like traffic enforcement and crime prevention. So the Israel Defense Forces repeatedly targeted police officers early in its 15-month military campaign, which it launched after Hamas killed 1,200 people and took around 250 hostage in the Oct. 7, terrorist attack, according to Israeli tallies. The Biden administration warned that Israel’s targeting of Palestinian police officers was adding to the chaos in Gaza and leaving humanitarian aid convoys vulnerable to looting. “With the departure of police escorts it has been virtually impossible for the U.N. or anyone else ... to safely move assistance in Gaza because of criminal gangs,” David Satterfield, Biden’s envoy for humanitarian aid, said earlier this month. On the morning of Jan. 19, uniformed police officers returned to the streets of Khan Younis and, like the al-Qudra family, they also appear to have mistakenly believed that the ceasefire had gone into effect. Hours after her family members were killed, an exhausted Hanan leaned her against the wall of a relative’s home. Several of her surviving children sat next to her, a blanket spread across their laps. She scrolled through photos of her children, pausing on a picture of a Sama taken during the pandemic. She was holding a medical mask over her nose, even though it was far too big for her small face. “She was like a rose,” Hanan said quietly. “May God have mercy upon her.”

Among those to be freed is Arbel Yehoud, whose release was at the center of a dispute that threatened to unravel the fragile ceasefire deal. Hamas plans to release three Israeli hostages Thursday — two women and an 80-year-old man — as well as five Thai nationals abducted during the Oct. 7, 2023, attack. The Hostages Families Forum said it had received news that Hamas will release the eight abductees. The forum is a volunteer-based group the families of the abductees formed after the attack. Among those the militant group plans to release is Arbel Yehoud, 29, whom Israeli officials had expected to be freed last weekend in the first phase of the ceasefire deal, in which a total of 33 hostages are expected to be released. The two other Israelis expected to be released are Agam Berger, 20, and Gadi Moses, 80. Berger was working as an observer at Nahal Oz base, where she arrived just two days prior to the Oct. 7 attack, and was captured alongside multiple other observers who have since been released. Moses was living at kibbutz Nir Oz, where he was one of the founding members of the kibbutz's vineyard and gave lectures on agriculture. His partner was killed in the Oct. 7 attack, the hostage organization said. Under the terms of the ceasefire agreement, 30 Palestinian prisoners and detainees have been released for civilian hostages and 50 for captive soldiers. The truce between Israel and Hamas was put in jeopardy Saturday after Israel blocked Palestinian civilians from moving back to their homes in northern Gaza. Israeli officials said that Hamas had violated the ceasefire agreement because it had failed to release Yehoud, a civilian, before captive soldiers. Hamas similarly accused Israel of breaking the deal, fueling concerns that a ceasefire that has brought a pause to 15 months of deadly fighting in Gaza could be imperiled. But on Monday, Qatar, a leading mediator in ceasefire negotiations, said that Yehoud would be freed along with two other hostages before Friday, soothing friction over the deal. Yehoud was kidnapped from her home in kibbutz Nir Oz, of which her grandparents were founders, along with her boyfriend, Ariel Cunio, 27. The couple had just recently returned to Israel from a trip to South America. Yehoud's brother, Dolev Yehoud, 25, was also initially believed to have been taken hostage into Gaza, but in September, Israel determined that he had been killed by Hamas on the day of the attacks and that his body had never left Israeli territory. Cunio and his brother David, 34, remain held captive in Gaza, with neither expected to be released in the first phase of the deal. Specific details of the second phase of the deal has yet to be agreed upon, although a Middle Eastern official told NBC News on Monday that the second round of talks are likely to begin in Qatar next week. Three more captives are expected to be released Saturday in exchange for dozens of Palestinian prisoners and detainees. Many across Israel are hopeful Kfir Bibas, the youngest hostage to remain in Hamas' captivity, will be among them. Specific details of the second phase of the deal has yet to be agreed upon, although a Middle Eastern official told NBC News on Monday that the second round of talks are likely to begin in Qatar next week. Three more captives are expected to be released Saturday in exchange for dozens of Palestinian prisoners and detainees. Many across Israel are hopeful Kfir Bibas, the youngest hostage to remain in Hamas' captivity, will be among them. Kfir, now 2, was just under 9 months old when he was taken hostage in the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, along with his 5-year-old brother, Ariel, and their parents, Yarden and Shiri Bibas. With 26 Israeli hostages still set to be released as part of the first phase of the ceasefire, a Middle Eastern official briefed on the matter told NBC News on Monday that Hamas has informed Israel that eight of the group are dead. A spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu later confirmed that these numbers matched information gleaned by Israeli intelligence. Hamas' disclosure was believed to be the first time the militant group has made clear how many hostages are dead or alive. Romi Gonen, Doron Steinbrecher and Emily Damari, a dual British citizen, were the first three hostages to be freed by Hamas earlier this month in exchange for 90 Palestinian prisoners and detainees, all women and children under the age of 19. Four female Israeli soldiers were later released Saturday in exchange for 200 Palestinian prisoners and detainees, some of whom were serving life sentences after being convicted of deadly attacks. Around 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken hostage into Gaza in the Hamas-led terrorist attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, according to Israeli officials. In the more than 15 months since, more than 47,000 people in Gaza were killed in Israel's offensive, according to Palestinian health officials. Researchers estimate that the death toll is likely significantly higher because of difficulties in counting the dead amid the war and with thousands missing and feared dead under debris. CORRECTION (Jan. 29, 2025, 9:15 p.m. ET): A headline on a previous version of this article misstated that Arbel Yehoud had been released due to an editing error. She is expected to be released Friday; she has not yet been freed.