Bring our hostage daughters home now... we’re begging you

An anguished plea from five mothers for hostages STILL held in Gaza

THE mothers of Israel’s youngest female hostages yesterday pleaded from their daughters’ bedrooms for negotiators to ‘bring back our girls’.

Teenagers Naama Levy, Daniela Gilboa, Karina Ariev, Liri Albag and Agam Berger have been held captive for more than 150 days and time is running out to save them.

Diplomats were locked in ceasefire discussions yesterday to try to free them along with dozens of other hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners before Ramadan, on Sunday.

With no signs of a breakthrough, the mothers sat down on their 19-year-old daughters’ empty beds and appealed to negotiators.

‘I ask everyone that deals with the negotiation – from the Israeli side, from Egypt, Qatar, Hamas – just do the deal and bring my daughter back home,’ Daniela’s mother Orly, 48, told the Mail. Karina’s mother Ira, 44, cried: ‘Please don’t forget my little

‘Difficult not knowing where she sleeps’

daughter – do everything you can to bring her to us.’

Meanwhile Liri’s mother Shira, 51, demanded: ‘Now, before Ramadan, we believe that something should happen – must happen.’

The Mail published an emotional article in January showing the terrified faces of Daniela, Karina, Liri and Agam hours after they were kidnapped from Nahal Oz, near the Gaza border.

They were taken alongside Naama, who was paraded in harrowing footage which showed her pulled by the hair and loaded into a jeep in blood-soaked pyjamas on October 7.

Naama’s mother Dr Ayelet Levy-Shachar, 50, sat on her daughter’s untouched bed, surrounded by her cuddly toys and the young runner’s trophies. ‘You’ve seen my daughter’s video,’ she said.

‘You can see her wounds and that she’s terrified and bloody. This is what I’m experiencing every day, thinking about her – for five months.’

She told how she and Naama’s siblings, Amit, 21, Michal, 16, and Omri, 11, go ‘in and out of her room all the time’. ‘We feel her and we’re waiting for her,’ she said. ‘I just don’t want to do this any more – I just want this to happen.’

Mrs Gilboa said her youngest daughter Noam, 15, sleeps in Daniela’s bed every night to ‘feel her’ older sibling.

‘I just want to see my daughter here,’ she said, clutching her photograph. ‘My Daniela, sleeping in her bed, in her room with her family hugging her, supporting her.’

Ms Ariev sat on her daughter’s sofa bed clutching Karina’s reversible octopus toy which has a sad face, but can be flipped inside out to smile. ‘Whenever she is back at home this octopus suddenly becomes happy,’ she said, turning the toy to smile.

The medical secretary, originally from Donetsk, Ukraine, then returns it to how it was, saying: ‘Since October 7 we are waiting for the octopus to smile again, for her to be back again.’

Holding back tears, the motherof-two adds: ‘Please, don’t forget about us.’ Meanwhile, Ms Albag hugs Liri’s cuddly elephant as she sits on her bed in Yarhiv, near Tel Aviv. She has not changed the sheets since her daughter was taken and has her Minnie Mouse pyjamas waiting alongside stacks of gifts for the teenager, who turned 19 in captivity.

‘All the mothers watching me, please help me bring back my child,’ the mother-of-four said. ‘They are little girls. It’s difficult not to know where she’s sleeping, what they are doing to her.’

Agam’s mother Meirav, 48, held her daughter’s violin. She said: ‘You are my oxygen, my breath of fresh air. I know I am going to see you with God’s help really soon.’