The Times of Israel

Hundreds of fans gathered outside the Tottenham Hotspur soccer team’s home stadium on Sunday to welcome released hostage and lifelong fan Emily Damari as she arrived to attend a game.

“I am very happy to be here,” Damari said in her first public appearance in the UK since her release on January 19.

“Thank you to everyone for praying for me, and shouting my name without knowing me, I don’t really have the words to say how thankful I am for that,” she told the crowd. “All of you are amazing. I hope Spurs are going to win today!”

Although the team’s fans did not know Damari before she was taken hostage on October 7, 2023, she became a symbol to them amid efforts to get her released.

“I want to give a special thanks to all the Jews in the Diaspora, but especially to the UK Jewish community, who came out to support my mother and my family, campaigning tirelessly to help secure my release,” she said. “May the other 59 hostages be home soon.”

Damari specifically mentioned brothers Gali and Ziv Berman as “very, very, very close friends of mine, and I hope they bring them home today.”

She then released a cluster of 59 balloons, each of which was carrying an image of a hostage still held in the Gaza Strip.

As she did, campaigners chanted, “She’s one of our own, she’s one of our own, Emily Damari is finally home.”

“It is quite surreal seeing this person that you know from a sticker in real life,” Tracy Levi, 53, a mother of five, told the Daily Mail.

“I can’t even begin to imagine what she went through, and the strength of resilience she has shown should be a lesson to everybody,” she said. “We haven’t forgotten about any of the hostages, and we will keep fighting until they are all home.”

Inside the stadium, Damari was greeted by a number of former and current top Spurs and England players.

Tottenham played against Crystal Palace, but lost 0-2.

According to the Daily Mail, ever since the start of the current soccer season, dozens of fans had gathered outside the stadium before every game to demand Emily’s release.

The welcoming ceremony was organized by the Stop the Hate activism group.

Founder Itai Galmudy told the Daily Mail the event was “to say welcome back to Emily.”

“For too long we have been waiting, dreaming that she would be released. We campaigned for her here in the rain, sun, in the good times, the bad times,” he said. “And to have her coming to the Spurs stadium today is the crescendo of this entire campaign.”

The Israeli Embassy tweeted photos of Damari’s visit to the stadium on its official X account.

On Friday, she was invited to the home of Israel’s Ambassador to the UK Tzipi Hotovely.

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. Another 250 people were also abducted during the attack as over 5,000 terrorists invaded southern Israel, killing 1,200 people, mostly civilians.

Damari lost two fingers when she was shot by Hamas during her abduction.

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.