Shocked by Trump, Europe Turns Its Hopes to Germany’s Election
In the final days of Germany’s abbreviated election campaign, the task facing its next chancellor has snapped into focus. It appears far more existential, for the country and for all of Europe, than almost anyone initially imagined.
Germany’s coalition government came apart just a day after the U.S. presidential election last November. As a result, a vote that was supposed to come this September is now set for Sunday. German leaders quickly realized that meant their campaign would be largely fought in the early days of President Trump’s second term.
They were nervous from the start. But they were nowhere near prepared.
In just a few short weeks, the new Trump team has cut Ukraine and Europe out of negotiations to end the war with Russia, and embraced an aggressive, expansionist regime in Moscow that now breathes down Europe’s neck. It also threatened to withdraw troops that have protected Germany for decades.
How Germans vote will now be a critical component of Europe’s response to Mr. Trump’s new world order, and will resonate far beyond their borders.
“It is not just another change of government” under Mr. Trump, Friedrich Merz, the leading candidate for chancellor, warned on Friday after taking the stage for an arena rally in the western town of Oberhausen, “but a complete redrawing of the world map.”
Perhaps no one has distilled the stakes of the election more succinctly — ironically enough — than the prime minister of Greece, a country that famously clashed with the Germans when it was digging out of a financial crisis a decade ago. Kyriakos Mitsotakis, a fellow conservative, addressed Mr. Merz in a recorded message broadcast to 4,000 attendees at the Oberhausen rally. He reminded the audience of Greece’s emergence from its economic woes, and encouraged Mr. Merz to engineer a similar turnaround.
“Dear Friedrich,” Mr. Mitsotakis said, “Germany and Europe need your leadership.”
Mr. Merz and other candidates, including the current center-left chancellor, Olaf Scholz, have warned of strained or even severed ties with the United States, while vowing to fill a continental and global leadership vacuum.
Mr. Merz openly questioned this past week whether the United States would remain a democracy much longer — or slip into full autocratic rule — and whether NATO would continue to exist. Mr. Scholz has said that Germany and Europe must be prepared to go it alone without Mr. Trump.
The question is what any of the candidates will be able to do about that.
Germany has been weakened by crises at home and abroad. The country’s export-driven industrial business model is broken. Its economy is no larger today than it was five years ago, and it is losing ground to the rest of Europe and other wealthy nations on several key measures of economic health.
Its domestic politics are mired in disputes about immigration, regulation, government spending and the mountains of paperwork that Germans must navigate to deal with daily tasks.
Among the other challenges for Germany is that Trump administration officials, including Vice President JD Vance and Elon Musk, have also embraced a hard-right political party, the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, that revels in Nazi slogans and is ostracized by all of the country’s mainstream parties.
Its likely second-place finish on Sunday is expected to heighten the sense of fracturing and potential paralysis in German politics.
The last German chancellor to be seen as a leader of Europe was Mr. Merz’s longtime party rival, Angela Merkel. She did so in part by forging a partnership with President Barack Obama. The current moment might demand the opposite.
No European head of state has emerged to lead the continent in opposition to Mr. Trump’s foreign policy or his economic plans, including threats of tariffs that could target European companies. Two leaders who might have filled that role, President Emmanuel Macron of France and Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain, have been hurt in their efforts by low approval ratings at home.
Nonetheless, they will travel separately to the White House this week, hoping to at least persuade Mr. Trump to slow the pace of his possible disengagement from Europe.
It could be weeks or months for a new German leader to join them. Even after the votes are counted, the winner will need to form a governing coalition, a historically plodding process.
Polls suggest that Mr. Merz will almost certainly not win a majority in Sunday’s vote, and that he could enter with relatively low approval ratings for a chancellor-to-be. Still, his fresh face could provide a jolt Europe needs.
“With a waning or even unreliable U.S. presence on the continent,” said Sudha David-Wilp, the vice president of external relations of the German Marshall Fund in Berlin, “Merz could be the chancellor at the right moment to heed the call.”
The incumbent, Mr. Scholz, has been hindered globally ever since his government crumbled last fall. He is now polling in third place, behind Mr. Merz and the AfD — a party that no other mainstream party will invite into government.
Mr. Scholz has shed some of his stoic image in recent days and grown more combative, both toward Mr. Trump and toward Mr. Merz. He promised stronger German leadership to nearly 2,000 supporters at his final campaign stop on Friday. He was in Dortmund, one of the last remaining strongholds for his Social Democratic party, and just an hour down the road from Mr. Merz’s rally.
“I find it irritating how everyone is now surprised by the current American administration. You could read all of this beforehand,” Mr. Scholz said. “And in this respect, we as Germany must also be capable of acting, namely by solving our problems in Germany and Europe and by sticking together in doing so.”
“We can do this,” he added. “The European economic area, with its 450 million inhabitants, is larger and stronger than the United States. We can manage our own affairs.”
Polls suggest that Mr. Scholz is a long-shot to retain his job. The more intense guessing game among German political analysts is what sort of coalition might emerge from Sunday’s result, with Mr. Merz at the helm — and how much it might help or hurt Mr. Merz’s global ambitions.
If his Christian Democrats win around a third of the vote, or if only a few other parties pass an electoral threshold for taking seats in Parliament, Mr. Merz could likely form a government with just one other party.
He has said that would never be with the AfD, parts of which Germany’s domestic intelligence agency considers extremist, though together they are expected to have a majority.
If the vote is more splintered and more parties clear the threshold, Mr. Merz could be forced into a three-party coalition. As Mr. Scholz learned, three-party governments tend to be more fragile, and more prone to infighting that slows down major legislation.
Being forced into a larger coalition, many Christian Democrats and their supporters concede, would almost certainly sap Mr. Merz’s power to push deregulation, tax cuts and other domestic initiatives through Parliament in a bid to boost the economy.
And if Mr. Merz is unable to reignite growth, analysts say, he will struggle to project the economic power needed to lead Europe — or to find the revenue to help Germany accelerate its rearmament.
Mr. Merz betrayed few worries on Friday, flogging his potential future coalition partners, including the Social Democrats and the Green Party, in his speech in Oberhausen.
“We look forward to seeing you here again in a few years,” he told the crowd — four years from now, perhaps, at the end of the next federal election campaign.
“Then we will look back at this year 2025, on the federal elections and the results,” he said. “And then we will be asked whether we have correctly assessed the situation, and whether we have drawn the right conclusions from it.”
The Unabashedly Provocative Youth Driving Germany’s Far Right
Young activists are forming a new core of Germany’s nationalist, anti-immigrant party.
They are building on the party’s base, which has traditionally been older, blue-collar men.
These young people, who often revel in being called extremists, are helping to broaden the party’s appeal ahead of the election.
And they are using social media and other modern political tools to get out their anti-establishment message.
The Alternative for Germany party, or AfD, with its anti-immigrant and nationalist platform, has long been the pariah of German politics. Its members have been fined for Nazi slogans and labeled extremist by the government.
Ahead of Sunday’s national parliamentary election, a new band of influencers has found a voice among voters by bringing a more youthful edge to the party known for its provocations and controversies. They welcome the scorn of protesters, journalists and the mainstream political parties. Some of them still trade jokes about Hitler and Jews, along with the occasional Sig Heil salute.
Their party’s energy and ethos has won approving nods from Elon Musk, an adviser to President Trump, and from Vice President JD Vance. And they have helped elevate the party to second in the polls, even as the political establishment has kept the AfD out of government as part of a longstanding commitment to sideline parties deemed extreme.
They are the changing face of the AfD.
When Marie-Thérèse Kaiser, 28, first went to an AfD event in 2017, she was surrounded by retirees. “They could have been my grandparents,” she said. Things have changed. Young people who might have been punks or hippies in a different time are now finding the AfD, she said — and posting about it.
Ms. Kaiser is a parliamentary candidate and a personal assistant in the office of Alice Weidel, the leader of the AfD. She canvassed for the party on a frigid Saturday morning in Sittensen, a small town outside Hamburg. She picked the spot because she had been uninvited from a panel discussion there because of lingering controversy over a social media post that violated a law against hate speech.
In 2021, Ms. Kaiser on Facebook criticized Germany’s acceptance of immigrants from Afghanistan. In the post, she asked Hamburg’s mayor whether he was creating a “welcome culture for gang rapes?” The government fined her 6,000 euros ($6,275) and convicted her of inciting racial hatred. Her online following grew.
Other young activists have embraced confrontation to win votes and gain followers.
On a recent Saturday, Michelle Gollan, 23, stood in front of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin with a stern look on her face. She held a microphone adorned with the name of her YouTube channel, “eingollan,” which has nearly 200,000 subscribers.
Her poster read “remigration,” considered AfD code for deportations. The dot on the “i” has been replaced by a pink AfD arrow.
She was trying to attract protesters to talk to her, to feed a new video and, she said, introduce her viewers to new ideas. She succeeded with a woman with an anti-AfD sticker on her jacket and a rainbow flag draped around her shoulders, who briefly debated her.
The tense discussion left a huge grin on Ms. Gollan’s face: “For me, being provocative also means triggering people.”
Whenever the AfD rallies in the streets, as it did in Munich this month after a mother and child were killed by an immigrant in a car attack, protesters show up. And when protesters march against the party, as hundreds of thousands have done already in Berlin during this campaign, young AfD activists show up in turn.
At such demonstrations, Christopher Tamm, 24, likes to wear a hoodie emblazoned with the logo of the AfD’s youth wing, which is classified as extremist by German intelligence. “I openly say that I am right-wing, that I stand for right-wing politics,” Mr. Tamm said.
The next morning, near Hamburg, an AfD supporter waved good morning to fellow volunteers who were canvassing for the elections. He left his hand up in a Hitler salute, which is illegal in Germany. “Keep your arm up like this a bit longer,” he said.
Being provocative and promoting fear and hate work well on social media, but that tone shouldn’t be adopted by a mainstream party, said Emilia Fester, 26, a member of Parliament from the Greens party. Ms. Fester isn’t shy about speaking out against the AfD. Whenever it spreads lies or disinformation on social media, she said, “That is something one must clearly call out and limit.”
The young AfD activists are an extension of a party that has found support in many corners of Germany since its founding in 2013. It is a party no longer defined by a single demographic, but infused more broadly into a society where many still see the AfD as far-right extremists. In doing so, they have created their own counterculture.
Wutbürger, a German rock band whose name translates to “enraged citizen,” started out making patriotic anti-establishment music. It has since embraced a far-right identity and fan base, forging close ties with some AfD politicians. It has also been classified as a “right-wing extremist group” by a state government in Germany.
The band’s song “Walhalla,” including the lyric “we send our enemies back to the Orient,” has gone viral.
“We achieved our own counterculture. Our own music, our own rap culture, our own rock culture,” said Andy Habermann, the band’s leader. “We don’t hear the mainstream anymore, we don’t see them on TV, we don’t listen to the mainstream anymore on the radio. We know they are filtered, sadly. We have no more trust.”
Live Updates: Hamas Releases 6 Hostages in Latest Exchange
Here’s the latest.
Israel delayed the release of 620 Palestinian prisoners it had pledged to free on Saturday, shortly after Hamas handed over six Israeli hostages, according to an Israeli official and a Palestinian prisoners group. The delay injected a new note of uncertainty over the fragile cease-fire in Gaza that outlined the exchanges.
The Israeli official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, said the release would be delayed until at least 6 p.m. local time, but did not give a reason. Amani Sarahneh, a spokeswoman for the Palestinian Prisoners’ Club, one of the main prisoner advocate groups, said Israel had informed Palestinian officials about the delay.
Kan, the Israeli public broadcaster, reported that a decision on whether to proceed would be made after security consultations this evening.
Hours before the hostage releases began, Hamas handed over the remains of Shiri Bibas, the Israeli mother whose capture with her two young sons during the Oct. 7, 2023, attack became a symbol of Israel’s anguish. Hamas delivered a body on Thursday that it initially said was that of Ms. Bibas. But testing in Israel found that it was not hers, angering Israelis and putting pressure on Hamas to hand over the correct remains.
The mood in Israel swung on Saturday between grief and joy as relatives of the hostages being released expressed their condolences to the Bibas family in live interviews. The Israeli military said forensic evidence showed that the boys’ captors had killed them “with their bare hands”; Hamas has said they were killed in Israeli airstrikes.
Hamas handed over five Jewish Israeli hostages in two performative ceremonies and quietly transferred a sixth hostage, an Arab citizen of Israel, at a separate location without large crowds of onlookers.
The first two freed hostages, Avera Mengistu and Tal Shoham, were turned over to Red Cross officials in the southern city of Rafah. Three more were handed over in Nuseirat in central Gaza: Omer Shem Tov, Omer Wenkert and Eliya Cohen. The three were dressed in khaki outfits resembling military uniforms, though none were in military service when they were abducted.
While those two handover ceremonies were highly orchestrated, with masked gunmen escorting hostages onto stages where they displayed release certificates, the scenes were more subdued than during some of the previous releases, when the atmosphere became chaotic.
A sixth hostage, Hisham al-Sayed, who appeared to be in poor health in a video that Hamas released in 2022, was turned over in Gaza City with no ceremony or live broadcast. Mr. al-Sayed and Mr. Mengistu were both captured by Hamas about 10 years ago, and the rest were taken in the October 2023 attack. All six were returned to Israeli territory.
Israel’s release of more than 600 Palestinian prisoners was set to be the largest group of detainees freed at once since the cease-fire began in late January.
But the two sides have failed to reach an agreement on the next stage of the truce, raising fears that the fighting could soon resume.
Israel and Hamas are nearing the end of the first phase of the six-week truce, which is set to expire in early March.
Under the deal, Hamas committed in the first stage to freeing at least 25 living Israeli hostages and the remains of eight more in exchange for more than 1,500 Palestinians jailed by Israel. The handover of all 25 living hostages was completed with Saturday’s releases.
Despite pressure from the Trump administration and mediators like Egypt and Qatar, Israel and Hamas yet to agree on terms to extend the agreement into a second phase.
That would entail an end to the war and the release of the roughly 30 remaining hostages believed to be alive in Gaza in exchange for more Palestinian prisoners.
Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza were eagerly awaiting the return of their loved ones. The Palestinian prisoners include 50 serving life sentences for involvement in deadly attacks against Israelis. But the list of those to be released also includes more than 400 people detained in Gaza, who have generally been held without formal charges.
The final swap in the six-week truce was set to take place next weekend, when Hamas is expected to return at least four bodies to Israel.
Rawan Sheikh Ahmad contributed reporting from Haifa, Israel.
Fatima AbdulKarim
Israel has told Palestinian officials that it is delaying its release of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners until at least 6:30 p.m. local time, according to Amani Sarahneh, a spokeswoman for the Palestinian Prisoners’ Club, one of the main Palestinian prisoner advocate groups. The Israeli prime minister’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
Israel is set to free the largest group of Palestinian prisoners since the truce began.
Israel on Saturday was expected to release the largest group of Palestinian prisoners in a single day since the start of the cease-fire with Hamas last month.
In total, 620 prisoners were being exchanged for six Israeli hostages released on Saturday and the remains of four Israelis handed over this week, according to lists distributed by Palestinian officials.
The completion of the exchange would indicate that both sides were still implementing the fragile cease-fire, at least for now, even as uncertainty loomed large over how long it will hold.
Of those set to be freed, 445 men, 23 minors and one woman were all arrested after the Hamas-led October 2023 attack on southern Israel, the lists showed. In addition, 151 Palestinians who have been imprisoned for years, including some convicted of participating in deadly attacks against Israelis, will be released.
For many Israelis, some of the Palestinian prisoners released since the beginning of the cease-fire are terrorists who were involved in brutal acts. For many Palestinians, those prisoners are heroes who sacrificed themselves while fighting Israeli rule.
Palestinian prisoner rights advocates have also argued that Israel has subjected Palestinians to an unfair military justice system, and in some cases, imprisoned them without charge.
One of the prisoners set for release on Saturday is Nael Barghouti, who has served more than four decades in Israeli prisons. He was convicted of involvement in killing an Israeli man, Mordechai Yakoel, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank in 1978.
Mr. Barghouti was released in a 2011 deal that freed some 1,000 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for a captive Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit. Israel rearrested him in 2014.
While Israelis celebrated the release of hostages and Palestinians anticipated the release of loved ones, questions about the future of the cease-fire loomed.
It was still not clear what negotiations have started over the second phase of the cease-fire — which calls for a permanent end to the fighting, a full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and the release of more hostages and prisoners.
The two sides were to start talks over details on the next phase more than two weeks ago.
Hamas has accused Israel of delaying the start of the phase two discussions, while Israeli officials have suggested they were not in a rush to begin them.
Adam Rasgon
Al Jazeera, the Qatari-funded TV channel, broadcast video of a man who appeared to be Hisham al-Sayed walking toward a Red Cross vehicle. Al-Sayed, who was held hostage in Gaza for nearly 10 years, is an Arab citizen of Israel.
Earlier on Saturday, Hamas handed over five Jewish Israeli hostages to the Red Cross. Those transfers took place before hundreds of people in performative ceremonies aimed to show that the militant group was still in control of Gaza. There was no such ceremony for al-Sayed.
Isabel Kershner
Reporting from Jerusalem
Hisham al-Sayed’s family said in a statement that they were “moved by Hisham’s return home,” adding, “After nearly a decade of fighting for Hisham’s return, the long-awaited moment has arrived.” Al-Sayed crossed into Gaza in April 2015 and was captured by Hamas.
Aaron Boxerman
Reporting from Israel
Al-Sayed, 37, suffered from schizophrenia, which likely led him to enter Gaza without realizing the danger, according to his family. Hamas held him incommunicado for years before releasing a proof-of-life video in 2022 that showed him lying in a bed with an oxygen mask on his face, apparently in poor health. Human Rights Watch called Hamas’s treatment of him and Avera Mengistu, another Israeli captive with mental health issues, “cruel and indefensible.”
Aaron Boxerman
Reporting from Israel
Hisham al-Sayed, the last hostage to be freed in today’s exchange with Hamas, has crossed into Israel accompanied by Israeli forces, the military said in a statement. His release concludes one part of the swap; Israel is now expected to begin releasing more than 600 Palestinian prisoners in exchange.
Isabel Kershner
Reporting from Jerusalem
In a video released by the Israeli government, Omer Shem Tov, one of the hostages freed today, is seen reuniting with his parents and telling them, “You have no idea how much I dreamed about you.”
Here is a closer look at the 6 Israeli hostages freed on Saturday.
Hamas released six more hostages on Saturday as part of its cease-fire deal with Israel, the last living captives to be freed under the current truce in Gaza.
As part of the cease-fire agreement, Hamas committed to releasing at least 33 of the nearly 100 captives remaining in Gaza, a number of whom are believed to be dead, in exchange for more than 1,000 Palestinians jailed by Israel and a partial Israeli withdrawal. Both sides are set to negotiate terms to extend the truce, but an agreement appears remote.
Two of the captives freed on Saturday had been in Hamas’s hands for about 10 years. Four others were taken during the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7, 2023, which prompted the Gaza war.
Omer Wenkert
Omer Wenkert, 23, was kidnapped during the Oct. 7 assault as Palestinian militants attacked a music festival, the Tribe of Nova, being held near the Gaza border. Videos and photographs from the time of the attack show him being restrained, stripped to his underwear and surrounded by armed men in the back of a truck as he was taken away to Gaza.
He was in touch with his family on the morning of the attack and had said that he was afraid. Relatives later saw video of his abduction. His grandmother, Tsili Wenkert, a Holocaust survivor who said that she had been saved by the Soviet Army, appealed to Russian officials for help in securing her grandson’s release.
Mr. Wenkert managed a restaurant in central Israel and was supposed to start a restaurant management course in college. His father, Shai Wenkert, pleaded for his freedom near Mr. Netanyahu’s residence in Jerusalem on the first anniversary of the Hamas-led attacks.
In a speech to a group of other relatives of hostages and their supporters, he said: “A whole year in which time has stopped. I’m still on the same day.”
Eliya Cohen
Eliya Cohen, who was 27 when he was captured, had also been at the Nova music festival. He took cover with other festival attendees when militants threw grenades into their shelter and stormed it, ordering Mr. Cohen and two other men out with them, according to his girlfriend, Ziv Abud from Tel Aviv, one of the bunker’s few survivors.
Ms. Abud had gone to the festival with Mr. Cohen, her nephew and her nephew’s girlfriend. Of the four, she was the only one to make it home. Mr. Cohen was shot in the leg during the raid, she said, and she hid with him under a pile of dead bodies until she felt him pulled away from her.
Mr. Cohen’s mother, Sigalit Cohen, told The Guardian in December 2023 that she had quit her job as an accountant to lobby for the release of the captives. Near the first anniversary of the war and hostage crisis, she wrote in an editorial addressing Israelis: “Have we learned anything from that cursed day? Have we taken it upon ourselves to be better?”
Hisham al-Sayed
Hisham al-Sayed is a member of Israel’s Arab Bedouin minority from the town of Hura. He is one of two Israeli hostages, along with Hadar Goldin, who were captured by Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip many years before the Oct. 7 raids.
Mr. al-Sayed entered Gaza in 2015 and was not seen again until 2022, when Hamas released a video purporting to show him lying in a bed looking dazed and wearing an oxygen mask. Mr. al-Sayed has schizophrenia, according to his family, and had attempted to enter Gaza before. Hamas accused Mr. al-Sayed of being an Israeli soldier and was thought to be holding him to pressure Israel to release Palestinian prisoners.
In 2017, a Human Rights Watch investigation concluded that Mr. al-Sayed was not affiliated with the Israeli military or government. After Hamas captured hundreds of hostages in the Oct. 7 assault, the families of captives who had been lobbying for their relatives’ release for years joined forces with relatives of the newer hostages.
Mr. al-Sayed’s father, Shaban al-Sayed, said that the family was awaiting his son’s return with deep anxiety.
“We don’t know in what condition he’ll return,” he said. “We’re waiting for him — and when we see him, we’ll know how much we have to celebrate.”
Avera Mengistu
Mr. Mengistu, now 38, is the longest-held living Israeli hostage in Gaza. In 2014, nearly two weeks after a cease-fire ended a 50-day war between Israel and Hamas, Mr. Mengistu was seen in security camera footage walking along the beach before crossing a fence dividing Israel from Gaza.
Born in Ethiopia, Mr. Mengistu immigrated to Israel with his family when he was 5 and lived in the coastal city of Ashkelon, some 10 miles north of Gaza. His older brother told Israeli media that Mr. Mengistu had been deeply affected by the death of another sibling and faced serious mental health issues.
Mr. Mengistu was apparently last seen in a video released by Hamas in January 2023, though the footage could not be independently verified. As with Mr. al-Sayed, Human Rights Watch later assessed that he was a civilian with a history of mental health problems.
Omer Shem Tov
Omer Shem Tov was 20 when he was abducted alongside two friends at the Nova music festival. His friends — Maya Regev and her brother, Itay Regev — were released during a weeklong truce between Israel and Hamas in November 2023.
In December 2023, after their release, the Regevs appeared in a video together wearing T-shirts that bore the face of Mr. Shem Tov, pleading for his return. “Every day there is like hell,” Ms. Regev said from a wheelchair, having undergone surgeries for a gunshot wound in her leg.
“I have a friend named Omer, and I really, really miss him,” Itay said. “I know what he is going through in there, and I know how frightening it is.”
Mr. Shem Tov’s older brother, Amit Shem Tov, expressed dismay after the end of the last truce. “The end of the cease-fire is the worst thing that could have happened because it seriously delays the release of my brother,” he said.
Tal Shoham
Tal Shoham was 38 when he was captured from Kibbutz Be’eri. His wife, Adi Shoham, and their son and daughter, ages 8 and 3 at the time, were freed in the first cease-fire deal.
Early last year, Mr. Shoham’s father, Gilad Korngold, was among a group of relatives of hostages who burst into an Israeli Parliament meeting to demand action on the abductees.
“The danger is increasing every day that passes,” Mr. Korngold said in an interview afterward. “Israel and the relevant countries in the region need to sit at the table — without eating or sleeping — and make this terrible situation end.”
On the first anniversary of the attack, Mr. Shoham’s family was still waiting. His mother, Nitza Korngold, like other Israelis frustrated with the government’s lack of progress on a hostage release agreement, boycotted the official ceremony and attended an alternative commemoration.
“My dear Tal, if you can see or hear me, we all miss you so much,” she said. “We are doing everything to bring you and all the hostages home soon. We will not give up on you.”
Isabel Kershner
Reporting from Jerusalem
The Israeli military and internal security service said in a joint statement that the sixth and last hostage set to be released today was in the hands of the Red Cross and would soon be turned over to Israeli forces in Gaza. That hostage is believed to be Hisham al-Sayed.
Isabel Kershner
Reporting from Jerusalem
The Israeli military said in a statement that it was prepared to receive a sixth hostage who was due to be transferred to the Red Cross soon. The last hostage that Hamas was set to release today is Hisham al-Sayed, an Israeli citizen from a Bedouin town in Israel’s southern Negev desert who crossed into Gaza of his own accord in April 2015 and has been held there since. He is expected to be handed over without a public ceremony.
Aaron Boxerman
Reporting from Israel
Kobi Cohen, the uncle of the released hostage Eliya Cohen, stood on the balcony of his home in Modiin, Israel, his forehead resting on his arm as he murmured a prayer of thanksgiving. The family had been even more worried about their nephew’s health after Eli Sharabi, another captive held with him in Hamas’s underground tunnel network, described dire conditions there after his return in early February. But today, Kobi Cohen said, “I saw the smile on his face and I knew while they may have starved him, they didn’t beat him in his soul.”
Reporting from Haifa, Israel
The Palestinian Prisoners’ Information Office released information about the 620 Palestinian prisoners and detainees who are expected to be freed today in exchange for the Israeli hostages. The group includes 50 prisoners serving life sentences, 60 with long-term sentences, 41 who were re-arrested after being released in a large exchange of prisoners for an Israeli soldier in 2011, and 445 people from Gaza who were detained without trial by Israel after Oct. 7, 2023.
Isabel Kershner
Reporting from Jerusalem
The Israeli military said in a statement that the latest hostages to be released — Eliya Cohen, Omer Shem Tov and Omer Wenkert — had arrived at an initial reception point in southern Israel.
Isabel Kershner
Reporting from Jerusalem
Eliya Cohen, who was just released, was seized from a roadside bomb shelter near the Nova music festival, where he and about 30 other people packed in to take cover from rocket fire from Gaza. Assailants threw grenades into the tiny shelter and sprayed the crowd with gunfire, according to survivors. Cohen’s partner, Ziv Abud, one of the few survivors of that shelter, hid for hours beneath dead bodies.
Isabel Kershner
Reporting from Jerusalem
The Israeli military confirmed in a statement that the three freed hostages were being accompanied by its special forces en route to Israeli territory.
Isabel Kershner
Reporting from Jerusalem
Live video showed the latest three hostages to be released leaving the handover site in Red Cross vehicles.
Isabel Kershner
Reporting from Jerusalem
Omer Shem Tov’s father, Malki Shem Tov, told Israeli television that the family’s mission of getting Omer released from captivity in Gaza was complete “after 505 days of worry, fear and longing.”
Aaron Boxerman
Reporting from Israel
In Modiin, Israel, the relatives of Eliya Cohen embraced and yelled with joy at the sight of him after more than a year in captivity. “He’s smiling!” says one of them, relieved. They had feared his condition would be far worse.
Isabel Kershner
Reporting from Jerusalem
Three hostages are being led by masked gunmen out of cars to the stage in Nuseirat, in the central Gaza Strip, for the handover ceremony. They appear to be Eliya Cohen, 27; Omer Shem Tov, 22; and Omer Wenkert, 23. All three look thin and pale and are dressed in khaki uniforms to suggest they are soldiers, though none were in military service when they were captured.
Isabel Kershner
Reporting from Jerusalem
All three were taken hostage while fleeing the Nova music festival near the Gaza border during the Hamas-led attack of Oct. 7, 2023. Gunmen encircled the festival site and ambushed people trying to escape though fields and along the road. More than 380 of the festival attendees were killed and dozens were abducted to Gaza. Cohen, Shem Tov and Wenkert are said to all suffer from illnesses that allowed them to be prioritized for release in this first phase of the cease-fire between Israel and Hamas.
Aaron Boxerman
Reporting from Israel
The handover of some of the remaining Israeli hostages appears imminent. White vans accompanied by Hamas fighters have arrived at the handover site in central Gaza. Live video shows that a large crowd has gathered, and flags associated with both Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a smaller militant group, are visible.
Aaron Boxerman
Reporting from Israel
Red Cross vehicles have reached the area in central Gaza where more hostages are to be handed over, video from the scene shows. The vehicles appear to be surrounded by a crowd but are slowly making their way forward.
Isabel Kershner
Reporting from Jerusalem
The Israeli military confirmed in a statement that the two released hostages, Avera Mengistu and Tal Shoham, have arrived in Israel. They are at a reception point in southern Israel, where they will undergo an initial medical assessment and be reunited with close family members, the military said.
Isabel Kershner
Reporting from Jerusalem
In broadcast interviews, relatives of hostages being released today have been expressing their condolences to the Bibas family after the remains of Shiri Bibas and her two young sons, Ariel and Kfir, were returned to Israel this week. The mood in Israel has swung between joy and anguish as the hostage releases have been interwoven with the Bibas family tragedy. The Israeli military said an autopsy showed that their captors had killed the boys “with their bare hands.”
Isabel Kershner
Reporting from Jerusalem
The family of Avera Mengistu expressed their relief over his release in a statement, saying, “Our family has endured ten years and five months of unimaginable suffering. During this time, there have been continuous efforts to secure his return, with prayers and pleas, some silent, that remained unanswered until today.”
Isabel Kershner
Reporting from Jerusalem
The family of Tal Shoham welcomed his release in a statement, saying, “This is an unforgettable moment, where all emotions are rapidly mixing together. Our Tal is with us.”
U.S. Pressing Tough Demands in Revised Deal for Ukraine’s Minerals
Ukraine on Saturday was seriously considering a revised American proposal for its vast natural resources that contains virtually the same provisions that Kyiv previously rejected as too onerous, according to a draft document of the new proposal.
Some of the terms appear even tougher than in a previous draft.
Though Ukraine had not finalized the deal as of Saturday afternoon, its assent to the terms would represent a capitulation to American demands after a week of intense pressure from President Trump. The American president views access to Ukraine’s vast mineral wealth as necessary repayment for the billions the United States has provided Kyiv for its war against Russia.
The deal could strip Ukraine of funds that are now mostly invested in the country’s military and defense industry, and that could help rebuild the country once the war is over.
The terms of the new proposal, which is dated Feb. 21 and was reviewed by The New York Times, call for Ukraine to relinquish half of its revenues from natural resources, including minerals, gas and oil, as well as earnings from ports and other infrastructure.
A similar demand was made in a previous version of the deal, dated Feb. 14 and reviewed by The Times. Four current and former Ukrainian officials and a Ukrainian businessman who had the terms of the new proposal described to them confirmed that the demand remained unchanged.
Ukraine had been floating the prospect of a partnership with the United States on its valuable natural resources as a way to persuade Mr. Trump to provide additional support for its war effort as well as guarantees against future Russian aggression if a peace deal is struck.
The new document provides neither. In particular, President Volodymyr Zelensky had been seeking security guarantees for Ukraine, a condition that was absent in the first draft agreement presented to him last week, prompting him to decline to sign the deal.
The new document states that the revenues will be directed to a fund in which the United States holds 100 percent financial interest, and that Ukraine should contribute to the fund until it reaches $500 billion — the amount Mr. Trump has demanded from the war-torn country in exchange for American aid.
That sum, more than twice Ukraine’s economic output before the war, was not mentioned in the previous version of the deal. It is unclear whether Mr. Trump is requesting that sum in exchange for past American military and financial assistance, or whether it would also apply to future support.
The revised proposal states that the United States could reinvest a portion of the revenue into Ukraine’s postwar reconstruction, including by investing in the development of the country’s subsoil assets and infrastructure.
The new draft agreement also includes provisions for revenues from territories currently occupied by Russia, in the event they were freed: The share of resource revenues contributed to the fund from liberated areas would be 66 percent. Russia currently occupies about a fifth of Ukraine’s territory, including significant portions of the resource-rich Donbas region.
The deal could potentially be finalized before the end of the day on Saturday, but it could also be delayed, given Mr. Zelensky’s previous opposition to its terms.
Keith Kellogg, Mr. Trump’s special envoy to Ukraine and Russia, visited Kyiv from Wednesday to Friday and discussed the new proposal with Mr. Zelensky.
A potential deal for Ukraine’s resources has been a major point of dispute in a rapidly deteriorating relationship between Mr. Zelensky and Mr. Trump. Their interactions became acrimonious in the last week as the American president assailed Mr. Zelensky in highly personal terms, calling him “an unelected dictator.”
The Ukrainian president, in turn, said that Mr. Trump was living in a “disinformation web” after Mr. Trump falsely claimed that Ukraine had started the war against Russia.
Two of the people who had the new proposal described to them said that one of the few changes made by the United States that could satisfy Ukraine was the removal of a clause placing the deal under the jurisdiction of a New York court. The provision had raised concerns on the Ukrainian side, because it could weaken Ukraine’s legal standing in case of a dispute.
The United States has allocated $119 billion for aid to Ukraine, according to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, a research organization in Germany.
The Trump administration has suggested that the mere presence of American economic interests in Ukraine would be a security guarantee for Kyiv. Top U.S. cabinet members have pressed Mr. Zelensky to sign the deal in recent days.
“President Zelensky is going to sign that deal, and you will see that in the very short term,” the U.S. national security adviser, Mike Waltz, said on Friday. “And that is good for Ukraine. What better could you have for Ukraine than to be in an economic partnership with the United States?”
A month ago, no one would have ever mistaken Germany’s often taciturn chancellor for an aggressive political campaigner. But prowling the stage in a dark suit and open shirt with a microphone in hand, Olaf Scholz certainly looked like one on Friday night.
At a nearly euphoric rally for someone trailing in the polls, Mr. Scholz spoke for 50 minutes before supporters in Dortmund, one of only two German cities where his center-left Social Democrats are projected to win the majority.
He trumpeted his government’s achievements, like raising the minimum wage and bridging the loss of Russian gas after the invasion in Ukraine. He told the crowd he could still win. And he took a swipe at President Trump.
“If you translate what ‘transactional’ means specifically,” Mr. Scholz said, alighting on a word often used to describe the American president’s approach to politics, “it means I only think of myself and I only do what benefits me.”
Nearly 2,000 Social Democrats jumped to their feet and cheered. “I thought he was in good fighting form,” said Elisabeth Schnieder, 69, who joined Mr. Scholz Social Democrats, or S.P.D., after she retired from her job as a senior care aide.
“I just wish he had shown that side earlier.”
The Friday rally was Mr. Scholz’s last of the campaign ahead of Sunday’s vote. It was also possibly the last of his career.
Mr. Scholz, 66, has been relentlessly optimistic (some might call it unrealistic) in a race that would have seemed hopeless to anyone else. That is because he was the only one who believed he could win in 2021, when his party was stuck at 14 percent before catching up in a few short months to win. That success seems to have inured him against the realities of the polls.
At the same time, Mr. Scholz has clearly relaxed in the final weeks of the campaign. Instead of standing rigidly behind his lecterns at recent televised debates, he leaned against them from the side, in a pose more befitting a 1950s-era Hollywood Cowboy movie than German politics.
It does not seem to have done the job. According to opinion polls, Mr. Scholz’s party is expected to come in with half the support of the conservative Christian Democrats of Friedrich Merz, and also behind the far-right Alternative for Germany.
Sunday’s election was scheduled seven months early because the government Mr. Scholz led collapsed in November. His tenure will likely be cut short by a sluggish economy, a shrinking export market and inane political infighting between the three parties that made up Mr. Scholz’s “future coalition.”
Even some of Mr. Scholz’s biggest supporters were not acting this week like he had a chance to win. The Social Democrats are Germany’s oldest party and have long partnered with organized labor. But this week, one of Germany’s biggest unions called a two-day nationwide public transit strike, ending just over a day before polls open.
Behind all of his bluster, Mr. Scholz and the people around him know that he has in all likelihood lost the chancellorship. His party’s best — and most likely — scenario is a grand coalition, in which the Social Democrats would play a junior partner to the conservative Christian Democrats.
It may spell the end of Mr. Scholz’s political career, but it would put the party in the familiar role of ensuring Germany’s generous social benefits stay intact, even under a conservative-led government.
“It’s the only way we can stop the C.D.U. from rolling back some of the progress,” said Christian Ratschinski, 43, who has been both a machinist and a union member for more than two decades.
Mr. Scholz seemed to hint that such political coexistence was possible, in an unusually friendly debate exchange on Wednesday with Mr. Merz, the man likely to replace him as chancellor.
Asked if he would consider getting on an aircraft flown by Mr. Merz, who is a private pilot and owns a twin-engine plane, Mr. Scholz grinned and nodded. “I’m assuming he has his pilot’s license for a reason,” he said
Mr. Merz’s response came quickly.
“Now you’ll ask me,” Mr. Merz said, “whether I would take him along for a ride.”
Ruwayda al-Aqaar was sleeping next to her husband and 3-year-old daughter in late December when they were awakened by the sound of approaching tanks and bulldozers. They rushed outside their small house and saw dozens of Israeli soldiers marching into their small farming village, she said.
“I was terrified,” Ms. al-Aqaar said recently in her home in the village of Suwaisah, in southeastern Syria, as her daughter watched “Tom and Jerry” cartoons. “We were afraid of being displaced and forced to leave our homes.”
For weeks, the family and their neighbors feared that Israeli forces would target their village after carrying out similar incursions into towns nearby. Just days after a coalition of Syrian rebels ousted President Bashar al-Assad in early December, Israel invaded border villages in Syria in what it described as temporary measures to protect its own security.
But the Israeli raids continued throughout January and into February, raising fears among Syrians that the incursions could become a prolonged military occupation. The Israeli troops have been targeting villages, particularly ones with military outposts.
In Suwaisah, the Israeli soldiers tore down a small military outpost that had been abandoned by Syrian troops who took their weapons with them after the Assad regime fell. And the Israelis demanded that residents hand over any weapons they may have had. This account of what happened is based on interviews with more than a dozen residents of Suwaisah and Al-Dawayah Al-Kabirah, a nearby village that was also raided, as well as photographs they shared from cellphones.
Suwaisah is a village of mostly one-story homes, its residents mostly farmers and herders. It was a little past 7 a.m. on Dec. 25 when the Israelis entered the village and were met by dozens of adults and children, residents said. Some of the Syrians tore off olive branches from nearby orchards as a symbol of peace, they said, adding that none of the residents who went out to meet the Israelis carried weapons.
“Syria is free, free,” the villagers chanted at the soldiers, who were armed with semiautomatic machine guns, “and Israel out!”
The Israeli military raids have terrified the villagers, who, like other Syrians, had celebrated the ouster of Mr. al-Assad and gathered in the streets, playing revolutionary songs and waving flags. But in this corner of Syria, the celebrations quickly dissipated into fear of an encroaching foreign army.
“They ruined our joy,” Ms. al-Aqaar said.
This part of southeastern Syria abuts the Golan Heights, territory that Israel captured from Syria during the Arab-Israeli War of 1967 and then annexed. The move is not recognized by most of the world, including the United Nations, which considers the land occupied.
Ms. al-Aqaar, like many Syrians in the region, feared that her village might meet the same fate.
Israel has in recent months seized a demilitarized buffer zone in the Golan Heights and territory in southwestern Syria — including Mount Hermon, the country’s highest point. It has also has carried out hundreds of airstrikes, destroying Syrian military assets, including tanks, weapons production facilities and air-defense systems, according to Syrian monitoring groups.
The Israeli military says it is acting “in order to protect the Israeli border.” Israel has long seen the Golan Heights as important to its security because it sits on the edge of Syria, Jordan and Lebanon, offering an important military vantage point. There is now concern in Israel that the fall of the Assad regime may have left a security vacuum in the area.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has signaled that the military would occupy the lands it has taken for the foreseeable future, “until another arrangement is found that guarantees Israel’s security.”
Israeli forces continue to conduct cross-border incursions into Syria with bulldozers and armored vehicles, according to Etana, a Syrian reporting and analysis organization. On Jan. 16, an Israeli airstrike struck a Syrian government convoy, killing at least two people, including a mayor, according to Etana and another Syrian monitoring group, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
They have raided former Syrian Army bases in the southern provinces of Quneitra and Daraa to demolish property, occupy land and demand residents hand over any weapons, Etana reported.
“This available evidence indicates that Israel may be expanding and entrenching its occupation over areas of Quneitra Province,” the group said in a report in January.
Israel’s recent incursions and taking of the buffer zone in the Golan Heights violates the 1974 agreement between the two countries that followed the end of the 1973 war, according to the United Nations. After that conflict, both sides had agreed that U.N. peacekeepers would monitor a 155-square-mile demilitarized zone between their forces.
The Israeli incursions have been condemned internationally. The United Nations said in January that “Syria’s sovereignty, territorial unity, and integrity must be fully restored.”
And in December, Geir Pedersen, the United Nations special envoy for Syria, called on Israel to halt its “very troubling” military attacks.
Ahmed al-Shara, the leader of Syria’s new government, has criticized Israel for its incursion, saying it was a violation of the 1974 armistice agreement.
Shadi al-Mleihan, a journalist who lives in Suwaisah, said he was among those who confronted the Israeli forces when they entered his village in December.
“We have been in a war for nearly 14 years,” he said. “We don’t want another war.”
In addition to destroying the outposts, the soldiers demanded that residents hand over any weapons in the village, Mr. al-Mleihan and other villagers said.
“They said you need to announce from the mosque speakers that we want all the weapons and if you won’t we have a megaphone,” Badir al-Krayat, Ms. al-Aqaar’s husband, said the soldiers told them. “We said, ‘We don’t have weapons; we are farmers.’”
As villagers confronted some soldiers, other troops were leveling the outpost, some olive trees and a small municipal building, several residents said. Two hours later, the soldiers withdrew toward Al-Dawayah Al-Kabirah, setting their sights on another abandoned Syrian military outpost there, residents said.
There, villagers gathered around the former outpost and sat on top of other structures in an effort to prevent the Israeli forces from destroying them. Then, according to multiple residents and a human rights group, Israeli troops fired on unarmed civilians.
At least five civilians, including a child, were wounded, according to residents and the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
The Israel military said it “does not target its operations against civilians or civilian infrastructures.” In response to questions, the military said it “operated near the village in order to neutralize military infrastructures which posed a threat” to its forces.
“Several groups were observed approaching I.D.F. personnel in the area,” the military said. “After calling on the crowd to stand back and maintain a safe distance, individuals continued to advance towards the forces that responded with warning shots solely aimed at the air.”
Khalid al-Aaqal, 17, a high school senior, said he was among those shot in Al-Dawayah Al-Kabirah in late December. He said he and other villagers went to confront the Israeli troops, “and they started shooting” at the villagers’ feet with semiautomatic machine guns.
“We didn’t think they would shoot at us because we didn’t have any weapons,” Mr. al-Aaqal said.
His cousin was shot in the foot, Mr. al-Aaqal and his mother said, and when Mr. al-Aaqal went to rescue him, Mr. al-Aaqal was hit in both legs.
“They drowned our celebrations with their incursion,” said Alaa al-Aawad, 24, who was shot in the ankle and spoke as he lay on a pile of thin mattresses, his left leg propped up on a pillow.
Villagers in Suwaisah and Al-Dawayah Al-Kabirah said they were anxious about what comes next. The Israeli forces have left, but residents said they could still see them moving on two nearby mountain tops that the soldiers have seized.
“We don’t know what their goal is,” Hassan Muhammad, 32, who was one of the protesters who confronted the soldiers in Al-Dawayah Al-Kabirah, said of Israel. “But we as a people, our goal is to protect our lands. We just got rid of one tyrant and we don’t want another to come here and occupy it.”