WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — Two dozen Hamas hostages were reunited with their families on Friday.
It’s the first group of hostages to be released thanks to a truce between Israel and Hamas.
Although they're returning home, James Philips, a licensed therapist specializing in military trauma, said they're likely not the same people they were before.
"They're going to come back and they're not going be like the person that left," Phillips said. "They're going to be different because that trauma is going to change their behavior."
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He explained that everybody responds differently to trauma, but these people will likely face several long-term effects and some could even struggle to be around people at first.
"Long-term effects could be a lot of things," Phillips said. "It could be something like a sleep disturbance, a startle response, acute agoraphobia could happen."
He said these hostages can be very easily triggered by things that may not seem like a very big deal to others.
"Some of the different types of treatment is just behavioral therapy to work on the behavior that you develop there," Phillips said. "There's also hypnotherapy, something called EMDR that uses eye movement to kind of desensitize your kind of startle responses, and there’s also different types of therapies that are long-term with medications."
Forty-nine days in captivity for these hostages were followed by an even longer road to recovery, but on Friday that healing began.
