After weeks of all-out war, Israel and Hamas struck a compromise on Wednesday that allows at least 50 hostages and dozens of Palestinian detainees to be freed, while also granting beleaguered Gaza residents a four-day reprieve.
In the first major diplomatic success of the war, Palestinian terrorists will return 50 women and children captured during their October 7 raids during a four-day truce.
After weeks of Qatar-mediated talks, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet endorsed the cease-fire agreement Wednesday after a near-all-night meeting in which he told ministers it was a “difficult decision, but it’s the right decision.”
The cabinet’s sign-off was one of the last stumbling blocks after what one US official described as five “extremely excruciating” weeks of talks.
Hamas released a statement welcoming the “humanitarian truce” and said it would also see 150 Palestinians released from Israeli jails.
“The resistance is committed to the truce as long as the occupation honours it,” a Hamas official said.
Hamas gunmen carried out on October 7 a cross-border attack, the worst in Israel’s history, that left around 1,200 people dead, most of them civilians, according to the Israeli government.
Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups also took an estimated 240 Israelis and foreigners hostage, among them elderly people and young children.
Israel declared war on Hamas, vowing to bring the hostages home and to destroy the militant group.
It launched a major bombing campaign and ground offensive in Gaza, which, according to the Hamas government in the territory, has killed 14,100 people, thousands of them children.
Israel said that to facilitate the hostage release it would initiate a four-day “pause” in its six-week-old air, land and sea assault of Gaza, while it stressed that the agreement did not spell the end of the war.
For every 10 additional hostages released, there would be an extra day’s “pause”, the Israeli government said.