ANDREW LIMBONG, HOST:
It's an historic day in the Middle East.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Can we get the documents, please?
LIMBONG: That's President Donald Trump speaking today from the Egyptian coastal town of Sharm El-Sheikh. That's where delegations from Israel, the Palestinian territories and mediating countries will kick off the next phase of the ceasefire plan in Gaza.
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TRUMP: With God's help, it'll be the new beginning for an entire beautiful Middle East.
LIMBONG: However, on the ground in Israel and the Palestinian territories, today was about homecomings. We start in Israel.
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AVI OHANA: (Non-English language spoken).
LIMBONG: For Avi Ohana, it's a day he's longed for. In this video posted to social media, you can hear him shouting a celebratory prayer as he greets his son, Yosef, one of the 20 living hostages who were freed from Hamas captivity today.
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OHANA: (Non-English language spoken).
LIMBONG: "Two years. Two years," he screams as he tightly embraces his son.
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OHANA: (Non-English language spoken).
LIMBONG: The freed hostages have been taken to hospitals in Israel that have developed an expertise in treating released captives. NPR's Daniel Estrin reports from central Israel on what the released hostages' first few days of freedom will look like.
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DANIEL ESTRIN, BYLINE: Helicopter by helicopter, freed hostages landed to cheering crowds at Rabin Medical Center in Petah Tikva near Tel Aviv.
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ESTRIN: We visited a few days ago as the hospital was preparing to receive them. Dr. Michal Steinman, head of nursing, has cared for other freed hostages a few times before in the war.
MICHAL STEINMAN: Usually, I'm telling them, welcome home. I'm so glad. And you're in good hands. You're in good hands. You came home.
ESTRIN: Five of the freed hostages have come to this hospital. They're all men in their 20s and 30s, all abducted from a music festival, the site of the single deadliest Hamas attack on October 7, two years ago. They each get new cellphones and ID cards, and each one gets three rooms - a living room for visitors, a room for their families and their own private room.
STEINMAN: This is a room where hostage - this is a room for the hostages. By the way, regarding...
ESTRIN: The bathroom is stocked with fancy body lotions and slippers. Their families decorate the room with some of their favorite things. The bed has antiallergenic sheets.
STEINMAN: We order them from special cotton because when you came back from hundreds of days of captivity, we learned to understand that there's a lot of skin problems.
ESTRIN: The last time hostages were freed was this winter. They'd spent about 500 days in captivity. Freed hostages spoke about being starved by their captors, held in underground tunnels. Today's hostages were freed after more than 700 days in captivity, some very thin. Steinman says they'll work with a nutritionist to slowly increase their appetite.
STEINMAN: I think it's a mechanism of the body because you have been starved for so long, you just lost the passion for food.
ESTRIN: Besides their physical health, there's also their mental health to look after. The hospital's head social worker, Keren Karina Schwartz, helps families reconnect to their freed relatives after two years in Gaza.
KEREN KARINA SCHWARTZ: Everyone is different. There are people that will come back and tell you everything in five minutes. And we meet people that until today don't want to talk about what happened there.
ESTRIN: She advises families to be sensitive. She's seen some families ask their freed loved ones too many questions, and other families not ask anything.
SCHWARTZ: If he sit in the room and tell you that he'd been through difficult thing in captivity, and you don't say anything, it's the loudest quiet in the world.
ESTRIN: The loudest quiet in the world. They endured the longest stretch of captivity, but have returned knowing they're the last ones, leaving no living hostages behind in Gaza. Daniel Estrin, NPR News, Petah Tikva, Israel. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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