In brief statements on Sunday night, two doctors at Sheba hospital suggested that the women were not in immediate need of emergency treatment.
“I’m happy to report that they are in stable condition,” said Prof. Itai Pessach, adding, “That allows us, and them, to focus on what is the most important thing for now — reuniting with their families.”
Sheba Medical Center has been the first stop for dozens of captives who were seized in the October assault and later freed, including many of those released in an exchange of hostages for Palestinian prisoners in November 2023, as well as the four hostages rescued in an audacious and deadly Israeli military raid in June 2024.
Professor Pessach, who has led the Sheba medical team for returning hostages, cautioned in an interview in June that first impressions can be deceptive.
“The thing I definitely know is to expect the unexpected,” he said then, after receiving the four hostages who were rescued. “After eight months,” he said, “we had a notion that they’d be much more broken, maybe look differently than they were.”
They had lost less weight than had been expected, he said. But then, he said, the results from medical tests start coming in, along with initial psychological evaluations, and “you start to grasp what they’ve been through.”
All four had come back suffering from severe malnutrition, Dr. Pessach said, adding that the lack of sunlight, abuse and psychological stress they had endured would have long-term implications for their health.
“As wonderful as it is to see Emily’s resilience, these are still early days,” Mandy Damari, Emily’s mother, acknowledged in a statement on Monday, in which she noted that Emily was “doing much better than any of us could ever have anticipated.”
In a recent television interview, Yamit Ashkenazi, Ms. Steinbrecher’s sister, said she was expecting to receive “a different Doron.” Ms. Ashkenazi also worried about telling her sister that so many of her friends were killed in the Hamas attack.