Mediator Qatar announced on Saturday when a cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hamas would take effect next day, kicking off final preparations for a truce that much of the world hopes will end 15 months of destruction in Gaza.
The deal is due to come 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 fighting alongside the United States and Egypt to reach a deal.
The Israeli government approved the deal early Saturday morning after hours of deliberation and amid internal divisions in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling coalition. The approval cleared the last hurdle, raising hope for Israelis who want to see their loved ones returned and Gazans who survived one of the most intense bombing campaigns of the 21st century.
“It’s a mixture 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.
Ms. Awad had planned to move into her newly furnished apartment with her husband in November 2023. The war disrupted 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, traumatized or dead.
In his first remarks since approving the cease-fire, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in an address Saturday night that 33 hostages would be freed in the first phase of the deal, “most of them alive.”
Defending the deal, he also noted that Israel had achieved major strategic successes in the past few months, including the assassination of top Hamas leaders. “As I promised you – we have 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 include Israeli soldiers, as well as doctors and psychologists, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity in accordance with protocol.
The release of the hostages is expected to be the first such major exchange since a week-long ceasefire at the start of the war.
“Those who were freed then were already malnourished,” Hagar Mizrahi, a senior official at Israel’s health ministry, said of the hostages freed during the 2023 ceasefire. “Imagine their situation now, after an additional 400 days. We are extremely concerned about this.”
Many of the women, elderly men and other hostages to be returned are believed to have been held in Hamas’ network of tunnels in Gaza, in conditions likely to leave physical and psychological scars. Israeli hospitals are preparing isolated areas where hostages can begin to recover in privacy.
“Last time we saw the Red Cross moving hostages, and some of them ran to their relatives, hugging them,” said Einat Yehene, a clinical psychologist who works with the Hostage Families Forum, an advocacy group. “It won’t be easy this time, given the physical and emotional conditions we expect.”
In exchange, hundreds of Palestinian prisoners will be freed. The total number of prisoners to be released and their identities were among the many points of contention involved in negotiating the deal.
The new agreement also calls for the daily entry of 600 aid trucks into Gaza and negotiations on 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 negotiations that resulted in this week’s ceasefire agreement. Mr Netanyahu is already facing an internal revolt within his ruling coalition, which his far-right partners have threatened to walk out of over opposition to the deal.
They called for continued war to root out Hamas, which led an attack on Israel in October 2023 that killed around 1,200 people, took another 250 hostage and started the war.
Mr. Netanyahu is also facing pressure from many Israelis who want all the hostages returned, and from the outgoing US president, Joseph R. Biden Jr., and the president-elect, Donald J. Trump, who both want an end to the war.
In his address Mr. Netanyahu said the deal preserves Israel’s right to return to war against Hamas if it so 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 are to return to the fight, we will do so in new ways and with great force,” he said.
Another uncertainty about how the deal might play out stems 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.
The Israeli campaign has left a power vacuum in much of Gaza, and lawlessness has proved a dangerous factor in efforts to get aid to people in need. There is organized robbery repeatedly deprived of truckloads of suppliesincluding from a convoy of 100 trucks withholding UN aid at the end of last year.
Israel has continued its attacks on Gaza since the cease-fire was announced, and in the last 24 hours, 23 Palestinians were killed and 83 wounded, the Gaza Ministry of Health announced 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.
Desperate aid is expected to arrive in Gaza once the ceasefire begins. Egypt, which shares a border with the enclave, on Friday intensified preparations to deliver aid including food and tents, according to Al Qahera News, Egypt’s state broadcaster.
