(NewsNation) — Sixteen more hostages were released, including one American, on Wednesday as Israel and Hamas agreed to extend a temporary truce by another day, minutes before the cease-fire was set to expire.
With eight more Americans hostages being held in Gaza, questions remain on how long will they be kept.
“As long as possible,” says Dan O’Shea, a retired U.S. Navy SEAL commander. He helped run the U.S. Hostage Working Group established in 2004 to help monitor hostages in Iraq.
Hamas last week agreed to release hostages taken during the Oct. 7 attack on Israel in exchange for the release of Palestinian prisoners in Israel. A cease-fire has been in effect for six days to facilitate the transfers.
In the lead-up to the cease-fire, the United States, Israel and Qatar were making it clear that talks were underway for a deal. It’s this acknowledgment, O’Shea argues, that raised the value of Americans held in Gaza.
“The problem is once you make concessions to terrorist organizations, you’ve played your hand,” O’Shea said Wednesday on “CUOMO.” “U.S. policy, while (it was) ‘never we won’t negotiate with terrorists,’ it was ‘we don’t make concessions to terrorists.'”
A dual Israeli-American citizen was among those released Wednesday. Two other Americans, Judith and Natalie Raanan, were released last month.
President Joe Biden earlier this week announced that 4-year-old American Israeli citizen, Abigail Edan, was among the 13 hostages released Sunday from Gaza.
In addition to the latest hostage release Wednesday, Hamas claimed three Israeli hostages were killed by airstrikes. The claim could not immediately be verified.
“It could be true, but you can’t trust anything coming out of Hamas,” O’Shea said. “Let’s hope against hope that this family is still alive, but only time will tell.”
Some 160 hostages remain in Gaza and are believed to be being held in underground tunnels used by Hamas to move weapons and people.
The hostages freed under the cease-fire deal over the past three days have largely stayed out of the public eye, with most still in hospitals.
Information about the conditions of their captivity has been tightly controlled, but family members of the released hostages have begun to share details about their loved ones’ experiences.
Merav Raviv, whose three relatives were released by Hamas on Friday, said they had been fed irregularly and had eaten mainly rice and bread. She said her cousin and aunt, Keren and Ruth Munder, had each lost around 15 pounds in just 50 days.
Raviv said she’d heard from her freed family members that they had slept on rows of chairs pushed together in a room that looked like a reception area. They said they sometimes had to wait hours before going to the bathroom.
Adva Adar, the grandchild of 85-year-old released hostage Yaffa Adar, said her grandmother had also lost weight.
In videos of their release, some hostages have waved to cameras and appeared deferential to their Hamas captors. One of the first Israeli hostages released told the media she was treated well in captivity.
O’Shea suggested people shouldn’t read too much into it.
“The entire time of captivity is one of just abject no sense of what’s happening next. You have no control of that situation,” he explained. “They are just thankful that their nightmare is almost over, but until they are in good hands and back in Israel, everything’s uncertain for them, and that’s why you see them being so docile, if you will, on the way out of Gaza.”
The Hill and The Associated Press contributed to this report.