hostage

MEITAR, Israel — Israel on Wednesday prepared to bury Ran Gvili, the last Israeli hostage recovered from Gaza, in a funeral that officials and mourners cast as both an intimate farewell and a national moment of closure. Gvili, 24, an off-duty police officer from the elite Yassam unit, was killed while fighting militants during the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led assault on southern Israel. His body was taken back into Gaza by the Islamic Jihad militant group, Israeli officials say. He was among about 250 people abducted during the…

MOGADISHU, Somalia — Jessica Buchanan remembers the voice before she saw the faces. After 93 days as a hostage in Somalia, wrapped in a blanket and bracing for the worst, she felt a stranger’s hands at her shoulders and heard a young American say her name: “Jessica, it’s okay. You are safe now.” The American aid worker’s account of abduction and rescue traces a grim arc through one of the world’s most dangerous kidnapping economies — from her capture on Oct. 25, 2011, near Galkacyo, to a pre-dawn U.S. Navy SEAL raid on Jan.…

MOGADISHU, Somalia — Al-Shabaab has released a video showing a Ukrainian helicopter pilot contracted by the United Nations pleading for his freedom, in one of the group’s most prominent hostage appeals involving a foreign national in recent years. In the footage distributed by al-Shabaab’s Kataib media arm, the pilot identifies himself as Oleynik Aleksandr and says he was captured after an emergency landing in central Somalia in January 2024, in territory controlled by the militant group. Addressing the camera directly, he…

Return of a body under the ceasefire exposes the fragility of a hard-won pause The slow handover of a single body from Gaza to Israeli custody this week read like a terse footnote in an unfolding diplomatic script — yet it carries disproportionate moral and political weight. Israeli military spokespeople confirmed to the Red Cross that a coffin containing the remains of a hostage was being transferred back to Israeli forces, part of commitments tied to the U.S.-brokered ceasefire plan. Hamas, meanwhile, said it had…

Ceasefire’s fragile calm: a pause that forces questions about Gaza’s future The quiet that fell over Gaza for a third day was not the deep silence of peace so much as the cautious hush of people catching their breath. A US-mediated truce has created a narrow corridor for the release of hostages, the return of displaced families and a summit in Egypt billed as the moment to “end the war.” But beneath the immediate relief — and the carefully choreographed optimism in Jerusalem and Sharm el-Sheikh — lie hard political choices…

Gaza’s skyline is being erased — and with it a fragile chance for peace Israel’s campaign in Gaza has entered a new, harsher phase: airstrikes and ground operations that have begun to smash the high-rises that once housed families, businesses and entire neighbourhoods. The intensified demolition of towers in Gaza City — as many as 20 high-rise buildings hit this week — is part of an assault that health authorities say left dozens dead and has pushed the territory further toward a humanitarian abyss. At the same time,…

An undated video with Olivier Dubois has been circulating on social networks since Sunday. Malian sources claim that it seems genuine. In the video of about one minute, the French journalist who was abducted on April 8, 2021 in Gao addresses his relatives and…

In Mali, on July 29, 2021, the artist Dr Kebest was kidnapped by a terrorist group with two members of his team, while he was touring the Timbuktu region. He was detained for three months and released in November. On the evening of Saturday, March 12, Dr. Keb…

In an interview with the Journal du Dimanche (JDD), published this weekend, French President Emmanuel Macron spoke about the anti-French sentiment in the Central African Republic, which he said was being exploited by a private military group linked to Russia. A reference to the private military company Wagner, a group that has no legal existence but has close ties to the Kremlin, say observers and whose…

Kidnapping is on the rise in Nigeria. About thirty Afaka college students, kidnapped two months in the past, have been lastly reunited with their households two days in the past. One among these former hostages, Fatima, who was pregnant throughout the kidnapping, instructed RFI a Hausa concerning the ordeal they have been subjected to throughout their captivity.…