The KC speaking up for British hostage families: ‘It’s been quite a rollercoaster’

When hostage Eli Sharabi was returned to Israel this weekend, after 16 months in captivity, Adam Wagner was simultaneously “delighted” and “shocked”.

The hostage is one of nine with British links for whom the human rights barrister has been acting. In a piece in The Times, Wagner said many had compared the “emaciated appearances” of Sharabi, whose wife and children were British, Or Levy and Ohad Ben Ami, to “concentration camp victims”.

Wagner’s work for the hostages began two weeks after October 7. A text from MP Stella Creasy asked for his help: one of her constituents, Sharone Lifschitz, had elderly parents who had been taken hostage (her father Oded remains in Gaza), and they were looking for support from the British government.

After 24 hours of trying to figure out what could be done, Wagner, who was last month told he is to be appointed King’s Counsel, got in touch with Adam Rose, a solicitor he’d worked with at Mishcon de Reya, and asked, “Shall we set up a scheme where we'll offer free representation to any hostages who are British or have British families?”

Adam Wagner and Adam Rose with the families of British-linked hostages[Missing Credit]

They had no idea how many there would be. “It could have been 50 British hostages, or it could have been none,” Wagner tells the JC. “And then they started to roll in.”

They soon found themselves acting for Noam Sagi whose mother, Ada, was taken hostage, and then the Sharabi family got in touch. They ended up acting for six families, three of whom still have family members kept in Gaza.

The work, he says, has taken its toll on both of them. And while Wagner is no stranger to “difficult” work, often acting for vulnerable clients in cases with complex political backgrounds, it has the additional element of being “very personal”.

“It's been quite a roller coaster,” says Wagner, “because we've become very close to the families.”

A major part of the lawyers’ strategy is building personal connections between the British-linked hostage families, the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary, including regular meetings in London and organising delegations.

“We’ve spent a lot of time with them and have been through the real ups and downs and the horrific experiences they're going through, and that's been very personally affecting for both of us. We're both just members of the Jewish community who are seeing this from the inside and the outside at the same time. It is very personal.”

At the very beginning, when they had spent a week advocating on behalf of Yocheved and Oded Lifschitz, the former was suddenly released within 24 hours of their direct communication with the Prime Minister and his office.

Yocheved and another elderly woman, Nurit Yitzhak, were released after two weeks, because of their medical condition. “I don't think we could take any credit for that at all, but it was just a very strange thing to have happened,” adds Wagner. It was his first experience of getting to know somebody “without them knowing you exist”.

Adam Wagner and Adam Rose with hostage families outside 10 Downing Street[Missing Credit]

Ada Sagi followed in November 2023, at the end of the first hostage deal, and then it was another two months before Emily Damari was released in January. “It was really unbelievable,” Wagner says. “You get to know people without them knowing you exist, which is very strange. You see all these photographs, and you hear all about them from their families. We worked closely with [Emily’s] mum, Mandy, and her uncle and her brother.”

It’s a “mixed” feeling, he adds because, while he was thrilled to see Damari return safely to her family, “on the other hand, you know that the other families are looking on, wondering if their relative is alive or dead, wondering if they're going to come out safely”.

He continues that he felt real fear watching Damari released into scenes of chaos at Khan Younis. “I was really worried that she was going to be lynched, because it looked really dangerous. I felt the same watching the release last week,” he says referring to Arbel Yehoud.

“I find myself thinking, ‘We've been working for so long to try and get them released. They can't allow something to happen to them in the final moments. It’s all so precarious. They're not being held by a state. They're being held by terrorists. And terrorists are bad actors’.”

Throughout the releases, Wagner and Rose have worked with three different foreign secretaries and two prime ministers. They have all been “pretty consistent”, although Wagner adds, “It took a couple of months for us to get any commitment from them at all.”

Emily Damari and her mother Mandy embrace near Kibbutz Reim, after Emily was released from captivity by Hamas in January (Photo: Israeli Army via AP)Alamy Stock Photo

He points out that if you're British, and you're detained abroad, or taken hostage, the British government has no duty to support you. It’s their discretionary decision.

“That means that you inevitably spend the first part of your work, or maybe all of it, trying to convince them to take you on.” As an additional complication, a number of those Wagner and Rose were working for, particularly in the first stage of the deal, were not themselves, British, instead only having close family in the UK.

“So we had to use all of the tools we had in our box, from legal letters to public advocacy,” he says. That included sending hostage family member Steve Brisley to speak at a Labour Friends of Israel lunch in 2023, to criticise the government, and organising a private event in Parliament, chaired by David Baddiel.

“It was all just different pressure points,” says Wagner. “And eventually, David Cameron's office got in touch with us and said he wants to meet with each family.”

The now Lord Cameron met them all over two-and-a-half hours the next day, one after another. After that, a team was set up – the Gaza Hostages Unit in the Foreign Office – to give consular support to the families, and help try to get their relatives released. This, Wagner says has been “really important”.

“They've done a lot more than nothing,” says Wagner. “It's a good scheme, and it would be very useful in other situations. I don't think they've ever done anything like it before, certainly not for non-British citizens. I think they did it to shut us up a bit, but that didn't work.”

He would like to see the British government doing more to stamp out hostage-taking, which appears it have resurfaced since it was prevalent in the 70s and 80s – “particularly by Islamists and by extremist Palestinian militant organisations”.

“It's now really back, and it's something which has to be stamped out. It has to be dealt with really seriously – you can see it can change the dynamic of a war with a terrorist organisation. I really strongly think the British government should be taking the lead worldwide on this. The British government has a lot of expertise in fighting terrorism. It shouldn't just be Israel that's having to fight that.”

Indeed, Britain lost Nadav Popplewell, a UK national who died in captivity aged 51 and whose family Wagner and Rose represented.

Lawyers Adam Wagner and Adam Rose and Sharone Lifschitz gave evidence to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee[Missing Credit]

“Emily, thankfully, has been released. But 15 British people were murdered on October 7. It's one of the biggest ever British loss of life outside of Britain in a terrorist attack. So, whether Britain wants to or not, this is its problem as well. And I think it really needs to get its act in gear and learn the lessons from what's happened here.”

He recalls the advice he was given by Richard Radcliffe, husband of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe who was released from Iran in 2022 after six years of being held in prison. Getting in touch to offer his help, Radcliffe told them that one of the oddities of this kind of campaigning is you have to try everything, yet you might never know what worked and what didn't.

“And that's been our approach,” says Wagner. “We have tried pretty much everything. People say all the time, ‘oh, that won't work. They've got no influence.’ But if an opportunity comes up, whether it's with the British or the Americans or the Qataris, we take it.”

As for the question of whether Britain could have done more to get the hostages out sooner, he says that what's been going on behind closed doors is hard to know. “Would it have been better if Britain had been in the room, negotiating? They've said that would have just led to more complications. The Americans are there, Britain are on the outer circle. In the end, the people in the room are Israel, Hamas, Qatar and Egypt. And every country would have wanted a stake, because there were 240 hostages, and they covered pretty much every major nationality in the world. There's an element of if only they could have done more. But could they have done more? I just don't know.”

What he has been advocating for is an envoy for hostages, based on the American model – and he says that the process is underway to appoint someone. But it has to be someone with the heft to make a difference.

“One thing I've learned is you need somebody who's going to be able to bash heads together. You need someone able to keep the British government on its toes. You can't have somebody who's just going to be an insider...”

He suggests someone who’s had international influence, like Lord Cameron, or a senior ex-Labour government figure.

“You've got to have someone who can stand up for families – these are people in the most exquisite pain. They're people who need not just support, but sensitivity. They need actions; they're not going to put up with being fobbed off. They really are unbelievable people. They're all ordinary people who have been put in this extraordinary situation, and they stepped up to it. And it's amazing to see.”