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Mother of hostage held in UN facility thanks UK’s Starmer for assistance

Mandy Damari called her daughter's survival in Hamas captivity a "miracle" and urged the U.K. premier "to get aid to remaining hostages now."

Former Hamas hostage Emily Damari, 28, is seen after her release at Sheba Medical Center in Ramat Gan on Jan. 19, 2024. Photo by Maayan Toaf/GPO.
Former Hamas hostage Emily Damari, 28, is seen after her release at Sheba Medical Center in Ramat Gan on Jan. 19, 2024. Photo by Maayan Toaf/GPO.

Mandy Damari, the mother of Emily Damari, 28, a dual British-Israeli citizen released by Hamas on Jan. 26, on Friday thanked British Prime Minister Keir Starmer for his efforts to secure her daughter’s freedom.

“Thank you @Keir_Starmer for calling us today and all your support in getting Emily home. Hamas held Emily in @UNRWA facilities and denied her access to medical treatment after shooting her twice. It’s a miracle that she survived, and we need to get aid to [the] remaining hostages now,” Damari tweeted.

Emily was released together with Romi Gonen, 24, and Doron Steinbrecher, 31.

All three women have said that Hamas held them in U.N. camps created during the war to protect Gazan civilians and provide them with food and water.

Farhan Haq, deputy spokesman for U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, told JNS on Wednesday that this was “a very serious allegation.”

“We call on those who have information on this to share it formally with UNRWA or other parts of the United Nations so that we can investigate it further,” Haq told JNS at the global body’s press conference in New York.

It wasn’t clear from public records and reporting in which camps they were held, when and for how long. Intelligence from captured Hamas terrorists indicates that several Israeli hostages were held at the Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, Fox News reported.

The United Nations and other global groups have criticized the Israeli military extensively for conducting military operations in and around shelters, U.N. camps and Gaza hospitals. The Israel Defense Forces has said that Hamas has a documented history of using such facilities for terror operations. The terrorist group is known to be embedded in civilian and humanitarian areas.

“As you know, any time we’ve received information on the misuse of facilities, we followed up with investigations,” Haq told JNS on Wednesday. “It is unclear at this stage whether the shelters were among those that had been abandoned during the fighting, so we’d need further knowledge about that and other aspects of what happened.” 

Guterres and the Jewish state have been at odds since the U.N. chief said on Oct. 24, 2023, that Hamas’s invasion of southern Israel on Oct. 7 of that year “did not happen in a vacuum.”

Eli Cohen, then the Israeli foreign minister, was at the United Nations that day for a Security Council session. He immediately canceled his scheduled meeting with Guterres, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has since refused to take Guterres’s calls.

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