Freed hostage Emily Damari thanks London’s Tottenham Hotspur soccer team, fans for support
Released hostage Emily Damari thanked the London soccer team Tottenham Hotspur (Spurs) and its fans on Wednesday for their support during her time in Hamas captivity.
Over the last couple of months, fans of the team, which she has supported since she was little, called for Damari’s release with a chant of “She’s one of our own” and by releasing yellow balloons during the team’s matches.
On Wednesday, three days after Damari was released from Hamas captivity, her mother, Mandy Damari, posted photos of her daughter on X holding a Spurs flag and wrote that she had told Emily about the gestures the team’s fans made for her.
“She is so touched and we can’t wait to join you again for a match,” Mandy wrote, adding, “Let’s keep going for the remaining 94 hostages, including eight with British links.”
Max Radford, a British pro-Israel activist and fan of the Spurs who was among the leaders of the movement for Damari, also posted the photos on X on Wednesday and wrote that the released hostage “wants to thank Tottenham Hotspur, together with its fans and players, for all their unwavering support during her time being held captive in Gaza.”
He added that Damari was “so touched to hear about all the amazing people who regularly released yellow balloons during the matches and tied yellow ribbons around the stadium and is so proud to be known as ‘one of our own.'”
Replying to Radford’s post, the Spurs’s media account on X welcomed Damari home and added that the team hoped to see her at its stadium soon.
The Spurs fans first held a rally for Damari outside the team’s stadium in November, carrying signs with her name and photo and chanting, “Emily Damari, she’s one of our own” and “Bring her home.”
In December, they released hundreds of yellow balloons during one of the team’s matches alongside the chant, in a gesture that was repeated at subsequent matches over the last month.
In a video he made last week, Radford said the fans of Arsenal, the team the Spurs were playing against that day, had also participated in releasing the balloons and calling for Emily’s release.
Damari was taken hostage from her home in Kibbutz Kfar Aza during Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel that started the Gaza war. She was released on Sunday along with Romi Gonen and Doron Steinbrecher, the first hostages to be released in the first phase of a hostage release-ceasefire deal.