Israel, Hamas Reach Deal to Release 50 Hostages
Foes to swap 50 Israelis held by militants in exchange for some 150 Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails and pauses in fighting
Israel said it agreed to a deal with Hamas to free 50 civilian hostages held by militants in Gaza in return for the release of Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails and a series of pauses in fighting.
The Israeli cabinet approved the deal after a long deliberation that started Tuesday and went into the early morning hours of Wednesday in Jerusalem. It capped weeks of painstaking negotiations brokered by Qatar, Egypt and the U.S., marking the first major diplomatic breakthrough since the war began on Oct. 7. Hamas confirmed the deal in a statement.
“I am extraordinarily gratified that some of these brave souls, who have endured weeks of captivity and an unspeakable ordeal, will be reunited with their families once this deal is fully implemented,” President Biden said in a statement. “It is important that all aspects of this deal be fully implemented.”
The deal will be carried out in two phases. In the first phase, 30 children, eight mothers and 12 other women will be released over a period of four days. The first hostages could be freed as early as Thursday, people familiar with the deal said.
In exchange, Israel will release 150 Palestinian women and minors held in Israeli prisons and there will be a pause in fighting over the entire Gaza Strip. Israel has also agreed to forgo any drone surveillance in northern Gaza for six hours, the people said.
The starting time of the pause in fighting “will be announced within the next 24 hours and last for four days, subject to extension,” Qatar’s foreign ministry said on social media. It added that during the pause, humanitarian convoys and relief aid, including fuel, will be allowed to enter Gaza.
In the second phase, up to 30 hostages would be released over a three-day period. In that phase, non-Israeli hostages could be freed, the people said.
Ahead of the announcement Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel will continue to fight the war against Hamas despite the pauses. Israel would continue “the war in order to return all the hostages, to complete the elimination of Hamas and to ensure that there will be no renewed threat from Gaza to the State of Israel,” the government said in a statement.
U.S. officials hailed the agreement between Israel and Hamas to release 50 hostages, including at least three Americans, as a major breakthrough following intensive negotiations for the last several weeks.
The hope among U.S. officials is that the release of these hostages could lead to the release of many more, not only the ones held by Hamas but by other groups, including the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
“We’re determined to get everyone home,” one U.S. official said.
U.S. officials also believe a pause in the fighting could also ease some hostilities near Lebanon where the Israel Defense Forces and Lebanese Hezbollah have been exchanging attacks. The U.S. has been acutely concerned about the violence inside Gaza spreading to other parts of the region.
For Israel, the exchange helps alleviate mounting domestic pressure on Netanyahu to cement a deal to free the 236 men, women and children being held by Hamas, including as many as 10 Americans, U.S. officials have said. In exchange for the hostages, Hamas stands to realize one of its long-held goals of freeing Palestinian prisoners being held by Israel, whom many Palestinians view as wrongly imprisoned.
International pressure has been growing for Israel to cease its incursion into Gaza, which has killed 13,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, according to authorities in Hamas-run Gaza, and touched off a humanitarian crisis. The figures don’t distinguish between militants and civilians. The Israeli military says it has taken all feasible precautions to avoid civilian casualties, but accuses Hamas of using Gazans as shields, which Hamas denies.
Israel launched the military campaign in Gaza in response to the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks—a surprise assault that Israeli officials say left around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, dead in their homes and army bases, at an outdoor music festival and in the streets.
Once a pause in fighting takes effect, the pressure on Israel to pursue talks and potentially make its pause permanent could rise, say analysts. It could also invite further pressure on Israel to negotiate the release of the rest of the Israeli hostages and potentially curb the government’s plans to pursue the total destruction of Hamas, according to analysts and former Israeli officials.
“You could see a real crescendo of pressure in Israel to continue with getting deals for the rest of the hostages,” said Daniel Levy, president of the U.S./Middle East Project and a former senior adviser in the Israeli Prime Minister’s office under Ehud Barak.
Relatives of the hostages have in recent days organized street protests and a march to Jerusalem that drew tens of thousands of demonstrators, and on Monday met with members of the war cabinet in Tel Aviv. Israel has been split over how many concessions the country should make to retrieve the hostages.
Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said on Tuesday that Israel will be making “difficult, important decisions over the coming days.”
“I am aware of the pain that the families are experiencing and I would like to tell you that for me—returning the hostages is a primary goal and I will do everything possible to achieve it,” he said.
Israeli officials have said in recent days that such a deal to release the hostages wouldn’t have been possible without Israel having put intense military pressure on Hamas.
Israel Defense Forces spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said in a press conference Tuesday night before the deal was voted on that all hostages will undergo an investigative debriefing, stating it will assist the IDF in “solving the puzzle.” Hagari confirmed that the IDF benefited from intelligence gathered from previously released hostages, including the female IDF soldier Ori Megidish, who was reportedly rescued during an overnight ground operation inside Gaza in late October.
For Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, the pause in fighting promises to give it time to regroup amid a punishing Israeli military campaign while achieving one of its political goals of freeing Palestinian prisoners.
“For Hamas, this will absolutely be presented at the very least as a symbolic victory. But keep in mind, there’s no doubt that Hamas has been significantly degraded by Israel’s assault,” said Tariq Kenney-Shawa, a U.S. policy fellow at Al-Shabaka, a Palestinian think tank based in the U.S.
For Hamas’s leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, the release of Palestinian prisoners would achieve one of the militant leader’s long-held goals. Sinwar, who learned Hebrew during his years in Israeli prison on a murder conviction, is determined to free more Palestinians from Israel’s custody, according to analysts and those familiar with his thinking.
Sinwar himself was freed from prison in 2011 in a historic prisoner exchange in which Israel freed more than 1,000 Palestinians in return for a single Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, who had been held by militants in Gaza. Sinwar remembered the exchange as a lesson that Israel will pay, sometimes in the extreme, to return captured Israelis.
Before Oct. 7, Israel held more than 5,000 Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza in its prisons, many of them convicted of security offenses. Since Oct. 7, the Israeli prison service has absorbed 2,601 new security prisoners, most of whom are adult male Palestinians.
Before the war, Israeli prisons held a few dozen female Palestinian prisoners and less than 200 minors, mostly teenage boys between the ages of 14-18, with some under administrative detention, according to data from Hamoked, an Israeli human-rights group. Most of the women are convicted of committing attacks against Israelis while many but not all of the minors are arrested for stone throwing, Jessica Montell, Hamoked’s executive director, said.
The deal “brings into play the leverage that Hamas always had by virtue of holding these people, but it was a kind of latent leverage as long as Israel wasn’t going to go down the release negotiations path. That latent leverage now becomes quite potent leverage,” said Levy.