But with the deal potentially needing to be vetted by Israel’s Supreme Court, the fighting and waiting continued for a 47th day. Bombs fell across the Gaza Strip on Wednesday. Hostage families endured the agonizing reality that the longed-for day of release might or might not include their particular loved ones.
“I am excited and hope that it will be my family; on the other hand, there are other hostages,” said Romina Shvalb, whose sister, brother-in-law and their two daughters are believed to be among the 240 held somewhere in the ruins of Gaza since they were abducted on Oct. 7. “The other day I had to pull the car off the road because I was having an anxiety attack.”
Hamas told Egyptian media that the four-day pause would commence Thursday morning at 10 a.m. local time; Israeli officials declined to comment.
The hostages will not be released in a single group, according to Israeli and U.S. officials, but are likely to be transferred to the International Committee of the Red Cross in small numbers.
António Guterres, the secretary general of the United Nations, welcomed the deal, calling it an important positive step but saying that more needed to be done. “The United Nations will mobilize all its capacities to support the implementation of the agreement and maximize its positive impact on the humanitarian situation in Gaza.”
Each hostage will be traded for three Palestinians — women or teenagers — held in Israeli prisons. Israel has agreed possibly to extend the pause in bombing by a day for every additional 10 hostages who are released above the initial group of 50.
Israel would allow more fuel and humanitarian aid — up to 200-300 trucks a day according to one aid official — into Gaza during the pause, U.S. officials said. An Israeli military official said the military situation would not allow for any of the hundreds of thousands of displaced Gazans to travel back north.
U.S. officials said they hoped the agreement — which comes after Israel refused to slow its military assault for weeks despite entreaties from allies, hostage families and humanitarian agencies in Gaza — would shift the dynamic of the war and perhaps lead to a broader cease-fire.
But even as Israelis celebrated the longed-for release of at least some hostages, military and political leaders insisted that the pause did not mean peace.
“We are at war and we will continue the war until we achieve all our goals: to destroy Hamas, return all our hostages and ensure that nobody in Gaza can threaten Israel,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared in a recorded statement released during the cabinet debate on the deal.
The final legal steps of enacting the agreement began Wednesday with the publication of a list of about 300 Palestinians being held in Israeli prisons. The law allows Israeli citizens who have been victims of militant attacks to challenge the release of prisoners at the Supreme Court. At least one advocacy group, the Almagor Terror Victims Association, filed a petition Wednesday to block the deal, according to Israeli media.
The high court has never previously blocked a prisoner release deal and is expected to allow the agreement with Hamas to proceed, according to Suzie Navot, a constitutional lawyer at the Israel Democracy Institute.
The number of Palestinians held by Israel has swelled in the weeks since the start of the conflict, most of them swept up in Israeli raids in the West Bank. Those potentially eligible for release in the swap include about 200 teenage boys and 75 women, according to a Palestinian human rights group.
Qadura Fares, the head of the Palestinian Authority’s Commission for Prisoners’ Affairs, told Reuters he expected the Palestinian prisoners to be released Thursday. Thirty-three women were on the list published by Israeli authorities. “We should take into consideration that when the war started, the number of female prisoners was 38, meaning nearly all of the Palestinian women imprisoned in Israel when the war started will be released,” he said.
“The release of a number of our prisoners during the war is a very important thing,” he said. “This deal can signal a start to a change in the general atmosphere of this war.”
In Gaza, there was no sign of a letup in violence Wednesday as bombing rocked areas of northern Gaza and killed dozens, according to witnesses. A resident of Jabalya refugee camp, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of security concerns, told The Washington Post that the dead and injured were being rushed to Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahia, one of the remaining accessible health-care facilities in the north.
Munir al-Bursh, the director general of hospitals in the Gaza Strip, said in a voice message from inside the besieged Indonesian Hospital that staffers were trying to evacuate patients through smoke and tear gas.
In the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis, officials transferred dozens of blue body bags from a truck into a fresh cemetery trench as a bulldozer stood ready to fill in one of an increasing number of mass graves. The 110 bodies, some of them badly decomposed, had been taken by Israeli forces from al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City when they took it over more than a week ago and were only just returned to the Ministry of Health, according Mohammed al-Najjar, of Gaza’s Religious Affairs Ministry.
He said the bodies had not been identified and had to be buried in a mass grave because of the large number of dead and the ongoing fear of bombardment.
Sirens also continued to sound in southern Israel as militants fired rockets out of Gaza in the hours before the expected break in fighting.
Pope Francis on Wednesday described the fighting as “terrorism,” categorizing it as a struggle that has “gone beyond war.” Francis seemed to speak without notes after meetings with family members of Israeli hostages in Gaza and Palestinian prisoners in Israel.
“I heard how both sides suffer, and this is what wars do, but here we’ve gone beyond war,” Francis said. “This is terrorism. Please let us move forward to peace. Pray for peace.”
The Vatican did not immediately respond to a request for clarification on whether the pope was referring to specific actions or the overall conflict.
Leaders around the world expressed hope that the hostage deal would mark the first break in a spasm of violence that began when Hamas fighters killed more than 1,200 people in Israel six weeks ago and has raged in Gaza since. More than 11,000 Palestinians had been killed in attacks as of Nov. 10, when the Health Ministry said it could no longer keep an accurate tally, although it has estimated that 2,000 more have since died.
Israel’s emergency government approved the deal in a turnaround after weeks of insisting that no pause in fighting was possible until Hamas released the hostages seized in Israel. The cabinet rejected a deal more than a week ago that was, according to media reports, similar in its terms to this one.
The back-and-forth reflected a broader debate among the majority of Israelis who both support the military mission of eradicating Hamas and also yearn to have the hostages released.
Right-wing politicians have opposed any pause in the fighting, saying the top priority should be destroying the organization that unleashed the deadliest single attack in Israel’s history. But after the scale was tipped by mounting pressure from the hostage families and the White House and rising public support for bringing at least some of the captives home, even several far-right Israeli government ministers voted to approve the deal.
In preparation for the release of the hostages, six hospitals in Israel readied special units of pediatricians, oncologists and mental health counselors. The hostages and their families would be housed in isolated, dedicated facilities and the hospitals would be barred from releasing information or photographs to the public, according the Israeli Ministry of Health. Social workers would accompany the children from the earliest point of their release.
Qatari officials, who acted as mediators between Israel and Hamas, expressed hope that the deal would lead to a longer period of calm and, eventually, to peace talks. The terms provide for additional military pauses if Hamas releases more hostages.
“The important thing is that we managed to produce a formula that will carry momentum,” said Majed al-Ansari, an adviser to the Qatari prime minister and a spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, referring to the provision that additional hostage releases by Hamas would ensure additional periods of calm.
During the four-day pause, Hamas fighters on the ground in Gaza are expected to locate and identify more of the hostages in the territory, according to Ansari. Some hostages are believed to be held by fighters affiliated with other militant groups, local gang members and individuals. Hamas has said that a number of hostages have been killed as Israeli operations escalated in Gaza, but verifying that information has so far been impossible.
Balousha reported from Amman and George from Doha, Qatar. Claire Parker and Louisa Loveluck in Jerusalem and Naomi Schanen in London contributed to this report.
