Mediator Qatar announced on Saturday that a cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas would take effect the next day, beginning final preparations for a truce that much of the world hopes will end the 15-month-old Gaza devastation.
The deal should go into effect at 8:30 a.m. local time on Sunday, said Majed al-Ansari, a spokesman for Qatar’s foreign ministry, which has spent months with the United States and Egypt trying to broker a deal.
Israel’s government approved the deal early Saturday morning after hours of discussions and amid internal rifts in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition. The approval cleared a final hurdle, raising hopes for Israelis who want to see their loved ones return and Gazans who have survived one of the most intense bombing campaigns of the 21st century.
“It’s a combination of joy, sadness and longing for a new beginning,” said Mariam Moeen Awwad, 23, who has been displaced from her home in northern Gaza six times since the war began.
Mrs Awad had planned to move into her newly furnished flat with her husband in November 2023. The war derailed those plans, leaving the couple in an overcrowded property and eager to return home, she said, “if it’s still there”. .
In Israel, authorities have begun preparations to welcome home dozens of hostages, not knowing whether they will return malnourished, injured or dead.
In his first remarks after the ceasefire was approved, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a speech on Saturday night that 33 hostages would be freed in the first phase of the deal, “most of them alive.”
Defending the deal, he also said Israel had made significant strategic gains over the past several months, including killing top Hamas leaders. “As I promised you — we changed the face of the Middle East,” he said.
Three reception points have been set up to receive hostages along the Gaza border, according to an Israeli military official. They will be staffed by Israeli soldiers, as well as doctors and psychologists, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity in accordance with protocol.
The hostage release is expected to be the first such major exchange since a week-long ceasefire early in the war.
“Those freed then were already malnourished,” Hagar Mizrahi, a senior Israeli health ministry official, said of the hostages released during the 2023 truce. “Imagine their condition now, after 400 more days . We are very concerned about this.”
Of the women, elderly men and other hostages to be returned, many are believed to have been held in Hamas’ network of tunnels in Gaza, in conditions likely to leave physical and psychological scars. Israel’s hospitals are preparing isolated areas where hostages can begin to recover in privacy.
“Last time, we saw the Red Cross transporting the hostages and some of them were running to the relatives, hugging them,” said Einat Yehene, a clinical psychologist who works with the Hostage Families Forum, an advocacy group. “It won’t be easy and similar this time, given the physical and emotional conditions we’re expecting.”
In return, hundreds of Palestinian prisoners are to be released. The total number of prisoners to be released and their identities were among the many points of contention involved in negotiating a deal.
The new agreement also calls for allowing 600 trucks carrying aid to enter Gaza daily and negotiations for the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the territory and a permanent end to the war.
Those negotiations are likely to be bitter and difficult, like the months of talks that produced this week’s ceasefire agreement. Mr. Netanyahu is already facing an internal revolt in his ruling coalition, which his far-right partners have threatened to quit over their opposition to the deal.
They called for a continuation of the war to eliminate Hamas, which led the October 2023 attack on Israel that killed about 1,200 people, took another 250 hostages and started the war.
Mr. Netanyahu is also facing pressure from many Israelis who want all hostages returned, and from outgoing US President Joseph R. Biden Jr., and President-elect Donald J. Trump, who both want the war to end.
In his speech, Mr. Netanyahu said the deal preserves Israel’s right to return to war against Hamas if it chooses. The agreement also allows Israeli forces to remain in a buffer zone along Israel’s border with Gaza and Gaza’s border with Egypt, he added, at least during the initial phase.
“If we have to return to battle, we will do so in new ways and with great force,” he said.
Another uncertainty about how the deal might play out arises from the chaotic, devastated conditions in Gaza, where tens of thousands of people have been killed since the war began and hundreds of thousands more live without homes, clean water or ready supplies of food or medicine. .
Israel’s campaign has left a power vacuum in much of Gaza, and lawlessness has proven a dangerous factor in efforts to help people in need. Organized looting has repeatedly stripped trucks of supplies, including from a convoy of 100 trucks carrying UN aid late last year.
Israel has continued to pound Gaza since the ceasefire was announced, and in the past 24 hours, 23 Palestinians have been killed and 83 others wounded, Gaza’s health ministry said on Saturday morning. More than 46,000 people have been killed in Gaza since the start of the war, according to the ministry, which does not distinguish between fighters and civilians.
Desperately needed aid is expected to enter Gaza once the ceasefire begins. Egypt, which shares a border with the enclave, stepped up preparations on Friday to deliver aid, including food and tents, according to Al Qahera News, an Egyptian state television network.
