Spurs fans to call for release of last British hostage held by Hamas

Tottenham fans will gather before their team’s game against Ipswich on Sunday to call for the release of Emily Damari, the last remaining British hostage held by Hamas in Gaza.

Damari, a Spurs supporter, has been in captivity for more than a year after being taken from her home in Kibbutz Kfar Aza during the 7 October attack on Israel by Hamas. Stop The Hate UK, an activist group based in London, has been raising awareness about the 28-year-old, who is one of about 100 hostages in Gaza, and about 70 campaigners held a rally for her outside the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium before Spurs faced Aston Villa last Sunday.

Stop The Hate representatives chanted “Emily Damari, she’s one of our own”, held up banners calling for her release and distributed leaflets about her story. The campaign will continue before Spurs host Ipswich, with campaigners calling on the British government to do more for Damari.

“Emily is a Brit and she should be remembered as a Brit and she should be treated by the public of this country as a British person,” Itai Gal, the leader of Stop The Hate, said. “We just haven’t seen too much from our government in the year and a bit now in regards to doing or saying anything for the hostages, let alone the British hostages.

“When we say ‘One of our own’ we mean it, because she’s a Spurs fan, because she’s a British person. She likes to drink cups of tea and loves football and likes going to the pub on a Friday afternoon with her friends. I don’t think enough people realise the fact that there is a real Brit sitting there for over a year now.”

The hope is that football can be a unifying force. “We want to harness that,” Gal said. “Once you focus on this it takes away many other reasons why not to do something – ‘Because she’s Israeli and I don’t know about this too much and people die in Gaza,’ and all these other differences. But when you come to football and say: ‘She’s one of our own, she’s sitting in a tunnel in Gaza,’ we want people to feel outraged. We wanted people to feel like they need to do something, however little it might be.”