A ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip took effect on Sunday after a nearly three-hour delay, pausing a 15-month-old war that has brought devastation and seismic political change to the Middle East.
Residents and a medical worker in Gaza said that they had heard no new fighting or military strikes since about half an hour before it was finally implemented.
Israeli airstrikes and artillery attacks killed 13 Palestinians between 8:30 a.m. local time, when the 42-day ceasefire was meant to begin, and 11:15 a.m. local time, when it actually took effect, Palestinian medics said.
Israel blamed Hamas for the delay after the Palestinian militant group failed to provide a list naming the first three hostages to be released under the deal.
Hamas attributed the delay to “technical field reasons,” without specifying what those were.
A Palestinian official familiar with the matter, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the delay occurred because mediators had asked for 48 hours of “calm” before the ceasefire’s implementation, but continued Israeli strikes right up until the deadline had made it difficult to send the list.
Two hours after the deadline, Hamas said it had sent the list of names, and Israeli officials confirmed receipt. Hamas named the hostages it was to release on Sunday as Romi Gonen, Doron Steinbrecher and Emily Damari.
Israel did not immediately confirm the names. However, one of the groups representing the families of hostages in Gaza, the Hostage and Missing Families Forum, said it welcomes the news of their expected release and released short profiles of the three women.
Steinbrecher, 31, and Damari, 28, were taken from their homes in the Kfar Aza kibbutz in southern Israel. Gonen, 24, who’s from the town of Kfar Vradim in northern Israel, was kidnapped from the Nova music festival in the desert near the Gaza-Israel border.
Canadian Maureen Leshem talks to The National about awaiting the release of her cousin, Romi Gonen, who was abducted by Hamas from the Nova Music Festival in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
The highly anticipated ceasefire deal could help usher in an end to the Gaza war, which began after Hamas, which controls the tiny coastal territory, attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing some 1,200 people, according to Israeli authorities. A further 400 Israeli soldiers have been killed in combat in Gaza.
Israel’s response has reduced much of Gaza to rubble and killed nearly 47,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza-based health authorities.
The war also set off a confrontation throughout the Middle East between Israel and its arch-foe Iran, which backs Hamas and other anti-Israeli and anti-American paramilitary forces across the region.
Ahead of the ceasefire’s agreed implementation at 8:30 a.m. local time, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said it could not take effect until Hamas gave the names of the hostages up for release on Sunday.
Israeli military spokespeople said in separate statements on Sunday that their aircraft and artillery had attacked “terror targets” in northern and central Gaza, and that the military would continue to attack the strip as long as Hamas did not meet its obligations under the ceasefire.
The Palestinian Civil Emergency Service said that at least 13 people were killed in the Israeli attacks and dozens wounded. Medics reported tanks firing at the Zeitoun area of Gaza City, and said that an airstrike and tank fire also hit the northern town of Beit Hanoun, sending residents who had returned there in anticipation of the ceasefire fleeing.
An air raid siren that sounded in the Sderot area of southern Israel had been a false alarm, the Israeli military said in a separate statement.
Israeli forces had started withdrawing from areas in Gaza’s Rafah to the Philadelphi corridor along the border between Egypt and Gaza, pro-Hamas media reported early on Sunday.
The three-stage ceasefire agreement followed months of on-off negotiations brokered by Egypt, Qatar and the United States, and came just ahead of the Jan. 20 inauguration of U.S. president-elect Donald Trump.
Its first stage will last six weeks, during which 33 of the remaining 98 hostages — women, children, men over 50, the ill and wounded -— will be released in return for almost 2,000 Palestinian prisoners and detainees.
They include 737 male, female and teenage prisoners, some of whom are members of militant groups convicted of attacks that killed dozens of Israelis, as well as hundreds of Palestinians from Gaza in detention since the start of the war.
Phase 1 of the ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas entails the release of 33 Israeli hostages, including all women, children and men over 50, in exchange for roughly 1,900 Palestinian prisoners. Efrat Machikawa, niece of 80-year-old Israeli hostage Gadi Moses, says her uncle will be part of this first phase, but his return date and current state of health are unclear. Machikawa says she is glad ‘for the end of the suffering’ and hopes Moses’s 14 grandchildren will see him again.
Hamas is set to release the first three female hostages on Sunday to the Red Cross in exchange for the planned release of dozens of Palestinian prisoners.
Under the terms of the deal, Hamas will inform the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) where the meeting point will be inside Gaza and the ICRC is expected to begin driving to that location to collect the hostages, an official involved in the process told Reuters.
U.S. President Joe Biden’s team worked closely with Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff to push the deal over the line.
As his inauguration approaches, Trump has repeated his demand that a deal be done swiftly, warning repeatedly that there would be “hell to pay” if the hostages were not released.
But what will come next in Gaza remains unclear in the absence of a comprehensive agreement on the postwar future of the enclave, which will require billions of dollars and years of work to rebuild.
And although the stated aim of the ceasefire is to end the war entirely, it could easily unravel.
Hamas, which has controlled Gaza for almost two decades, has survived despite losing its top leadership and thousands of fighters.
Israel has vowed it will not allow Hamas to return to power and has cleared large stretches of ground inside Gaza, in a step widely seen as a move toward creating a buffer zone that will allow its troops to act freely against threats in the enclave.
In Israel, the return of the hostages may ease some of the public anger against Netanyahu and his right-wing government over the Oct. 7 security failure that led to the deadliest single day in the country’s history.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Saturday in a televised address that his government is treating the ceasefire with Hamas as temporary and retains the ‘right to return to combat.’
The war sent shockwaves across the region, triggering a conflict with the Tehran-backed Lebanese Hezbollah movement and bringing Israel into direct conflict with its arch-foe Iran for the first time.
It has also transformed the Middle East. Iran, which spent billions building up a network of militant groups around Israel, has seen its “Axis of Resistance” wrecked and was unable to inflict more than minimal damage on Israel in two major missile attacks.
Hezbollah, whose huge missile arsenal was once seen as the biggest threat to Israel, has seen its its top leadership killed and most of its missiles and military infrastructure destroyed.
On the diplomatic front, Israel has faced outrage and isolation over the death and devastation in Gaza.
Netanyahu faces an International Criminal Court arrest warrant on war crimes allegations and separate accusations of genocide at the International Court of Justice.
Israel has reacted with fury to both cases, rejecting the charges as politically motivated and accusing South Africa, which brought the original ICJ case as well as the countries that have joined it, of antisemitism.