Three Israeli hostages and dozens of Palestinian prisoners released

Mr Siegel’s wife, Adrienne, said “there’s no one happier than me” as she was filmed getting into a car to go and meet her husband.

The family of French-Israeli Mr Kalderon said in a statement that they were “overwhelmed with joy, relief, and emotion after 484 long and difficult days of unbearable waiting”.

They added that he “endured months in a nightmare”, holding onto the “hope of embracing his children again”.

But others, like Liz Domsky, had mixed feelings.

“They all need to come home,” she said while watching the proceedings from Hostages Square.

“I have a student there, Bar Kupershtein. I was a teacher in the high school where he studied. We are very worried about him. We hope he’ll come back. He’s not in the first list.”

There was a similar complexity of emotion in Israel over the release of Mr Bibas, whose wife, Shiri, and two young sons, Ariel and Kfir, were also kidnapped during the 7 October 2023 attack by Hamas.

Hamas claimed that they had been killed by an Israeli air strike early on in the ensuing war – but were named in a list of hostages it said in January it was willing to free.

Holding up an image of Kfir, who was just nine months old when he was taken, Andrea Wittenberg remarked: “They are children. They should be at home. It is impossible for them to be in Gaza.”

She added: “I don’t want to give up.”

Israeli President Isaac Herzog described Mr Bibas’s return as “simply heartbreaking”, saying his country remained “deeply concerned” about their fate. “As an entire nation we hold them in our hearts,” he wrote.

Herzog added that each released hostage “deserves the time to rehabilitate and rebuild their lives, and every one of the hostages deserves to come home soon”.