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Israel Begins Freeing over 300 Palestinian Prisoners after Receiving 3 Hostages

A drone view shows Palestinian Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants escorting Iair Horn, US-Israeli Sagui Dekel-Chen and Russian-Israeli Sasha (Alexander) Troufanov, hostages held in Gaza since the deadly October 7, 2023 attack, as they released as part of a ceasefire and a hostages-prisoners swap deal between Hamas and Israel in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, February 15, 2025. REUTERS/Stringer
A drone view shows Palestinian Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants escorting Iair Horn, US-Israeli Sagui Dekel-Chen and Russian-Israeli Sasha (Alexander) Troufanov, hostages held in Gaza since the deadly October 7, 2023 attack, as they released as part of a ceasefire and a hostages-prisoners swap deal between Hamas and Israel in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, February 15, 2025. REUTERS/Stringer
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Israel Begins Freeing over 300 Palestinian Prisoners after Receiving 3 Hostages

A drone view shows Palestinian Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants escorting Iair Horn, US-Israeli Sagui Dekel-Chen and Russian-Israeli Sasha (Alexander) Troufanov, hostages held in Gaza since the deadly October 7, 2023 attack, as they released as part of a ceasefire and a hostages-prisoners swap deal between Hamas and Israel in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, February 15, 2025. REUTERS/Stringer
A drone view shows Palestinian Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants escorting Iair Horn, US-Israeli Sagui Dekel-Chen and Russian-Israeli Sasha (Alexander) Troufanov, hostages held in Gaza since the deadly October 7, 2023 attack, as they released as part of a ceasefire and a hostages-prisoners swap deal between Hamas and Israel in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, February 15, 2025. REUTERS/Stringer

Israeli authorities confirmed they received three Israeli men held hostage in the Gaza Strip on Saturday after Hamas handed them over to the Red Cross in exchange for more than 300 Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails.
The three are Iair Horn, 46, Sagui Dekel Chen, 36, and Alexander (Sasha) Troufanov, 29. All are dual nationals.
Horn was abducted along with his brother, Eitan, who remains in captivity.
Among the most prominent of the Palestinian prisoners set to be released is Ahmed Barghouti, 48, a close aide of militant leader and iconic Palestinian political figure Marwan Barghouti.
It's the latest indication that the fragile ceasefire deal, which teetered in recent days, will hold.
Nearly all the 73 remaining hostages are men, including Israeli soldiers, and about half are believed to be dead, The Associated Press reported.
The two sides have carried out five swaps since the ceasefire began on Jan. 19, freeing 21 hostages and over 730 Palestinian prisoners so far during the first phase of the truce. The war could resume if no agreement is reached on the more complicated second phase, which calls for the return of all remaining hostages captured in Hamas' attack on Oct. 7, 2023, and an indefinite extension of the truce.

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Families of Disappeared in Syria Want the Search to Continue on Conflict’s 14th Anniversary

Family members hold pictures of their relatives who disappeared in the nearly 14-year Syrian civil war, during a protest calling on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them, in the city of Daraa, Syria, Sunday, March 16, 2025. (AP)
Family members hold pictures of their relatives who disappeared in the nearly 14-year Syrian civil war, during a protest calling on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them, in the city of Daraa, Syria, Sunday, March 16, 2025. (AP)
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Families of Disappeared in Syria Want the Search to Continue on Conflict’s 14th Anniversary

Family members hold pictures of their relatives who disappeared in the nearly 14-year Syrian civil war, during a protest calling on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them, in the city of Daraa, Syria, Sunday, March 16, 2025. (AP)
Family members hold pictures of their relatives who disappeared in the nearly 14-year Syrian civil war, during a protest calling on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them, in the city of Daraa, Syria, Sunday, March 16, 2025. (AP)

Family members of Syrians who disappeared in the 14-year civil war on Sunday gathered in the city of Daraa and called on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them.

The United Nations in 2021 estimated that over 130,000 Syrians were taken away and disappeared, many of them detained by Bashar al-Assad's network of intelligence agencies, as well as by opposition fighters and the extremist ISIS group. Advocacy group The Syrian Campaign says some 112,000 are still missing to this day.

When opposition led by group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham overthrew President Bashar Assad in April, they stormed prisons and released detainees from the ousted government's dungeons.

Families of the missing quickly rushed to the prisons seeking their loved ones. While there were some reunions, rescue services also discovered mass graves around the country and used whatever remains they could retrieve to identify the dead.

Wafa Mustafa held a placard of her father, Ali, who was detained by the Assad government's security forces in 2013. She fled a week later to Germany, fearing she would also be detained, and hasn't heard from him since.

Like many other Syrians who fled the conflict or went into exile for their activism, she often held protests and rallied in European cities. Now, she has returned twice since Assad's ouster, trying to figure out her father's whereabouts.

“I’m trying, feeling both hope and despair, to find any answer on the fate of my father,” she told The Associated Press. “I searched inside the prisons, the morgues, the hospitals, and through the bodies of the martyrs, but I still couldn’t find anything.”

A United Nations-backed commission on Friday urged the government led by interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa to preserve evidence and anything they can document from prisons in the ongoing search for the disappeared and to pursue perpetrators.

Some foreign nationals are missing in Syria as well, notably American journalist Austin Tice, whose mother visited Syria in January and met with al-Sharaa. Tice has not been heard from other than a video released weeks after his disappearance in 2012 that showed him blindfolded and held by armed men.

Syria’s conflict started as one of the popular uprisings of the so-called 2011 Arab Spring, before Assad crushed the largely peaceful protests and a civil war erupted. Half a million people have been killed and more than 5 million left the country as refugees.