Israel said it was preparing for the release of all of its hostages after Hamas agreed to parts of Donald Trump’s plan to end its two-year war in Gaza and the US president ordered Israel to “immediately” halt its offensive.
Hamas announced on Friday night that it would release the hostages in line with Trump’s 20-point peace plan, raising hopes of an end to the war that has devastated Gaza and triggered a regional conflict.
By Saturday morning, Israel said it was preparing for Hamas to free the 48 captives in the strip, 20 of whom are still alive, while Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sidestepped the larger challenges ahead. He insisted in a short overnight statement that the war would end only on Israel’s terms.
There were conflicting reports on whether the Israeli military had fully complied with Trump’s demand that it immediately cease its bombardment of the enclave to facilitate the hostages’ release.
Palestinians reported scattered explosions in Gaza City as well as in the northern and southern edges of the strip. The Israeli military already controls more than 40 per cent of the city, and warned on Saturday that much of it was still an active combat zone.
“The bombing in the west of the city intensified overnight until around dawn, and I heard missile strikes around 8am and just now there was shelling,” said Ahmed, speaking by phone from Gaza City’s old quarter. “Reconnaissance planes are still in the sky.”
But Israeli military reporters were briefed that Operation Gideon’s Chariot II, a vast offensive to seize the ruins of Gaza City, the enclave’s largest population centre, had been paused overnight.
An Israeli official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said “things have changed, but not fully stopped”, referring to the offensive. An Israeli military spokesman said its soldiers were still operating in Gaza City.
The Israel military said only that it had been instructed by the “political echelon” to “advance readiness . . . for the release of the hostages” and that it was moving additional capabilities to the Southern Command, which runs the war in Gaza, “to ensure the protection of the troops”.
Netanyahu released a statement overnight embracing the first phase of the Trump plan, which requires all the hostages to be released within 72 hours of an agreement, without discussing the more complex and politically challenging next steps, which threaten the survival of his far-right coalition.
Those include a ceasefire, a possible amnesty — or even safe passage overseas — for Hamas members who renounce violence, the eventual withdrawal of Israeli troops and the handover of the territory to a committee of Palestinian technocrats, overseen by an international supervisory board, and a foreign stabilisation force.
The ceasefire will also require Israel to allow the UN to increase food and medical aid to the enclave’s 2mn population, most of whom have endured widespread hunger, disease and repeated displacements under Israel’s offensive.
Israel will also be required to release about 2,000 Palestinian prisoners, 250 of whom are serving life sentences, and allow reconstruction material into Gaza.
Israel and Hamas have swapped thousands of Palestinians for dozens of Israeli and foreign hostages in shortlived ceasefires since October 7, 2023, when Hamas sparked the war, killing 1,200 people in Israel and taking some 250 hostages.
But the deeply contentious issues over the future of Gaza also hold the promise of bringing an end to two years of hostilities, during which the Israeli military has killed at least 66,000 Palestinians, according to local officials, and devastated most of the Gaza Strip.
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Trump outlined the challenges in a video statement on Friday night on Truth Social. “We’ll see how it all turns out — we have to get the final word down in concrete,” he said.
Israel and Hamas are expected to want to renegotiate elements of the plan, some of the details of which are vague, especially the timeline and conditions under which Israeli forces will withdraw from Gaza.
Analysts said that there would be significant hurdles to implementing the proposal and getting the warring parties to agree on the finer details.
Qatar said it had begun working with Egypt, the other main Arab mediator, and the US “to continue discussions on the plan in order to ensure a path towards ending the war”.
Hamas’s surprise decision to enter negotiations came hours after Trump issued the Sunday deadline to agree to his plan or else “all hell . . . will break out”.
Despite Hamas agreeing to release the remaining hostages, its statement avoided many of the issues in Trump’s plan, which are crucial to winning Netanyahu’s full backing.
Those include the disarmament of the group and its removal from future Palestinian politics.
A person briefed on the talks said the main issues Hamas wanted to negotiate included details of the Israeli troop withdrawal from the strip and the international stabilisation force the plan envisages deploying there.
Pressed about Trump’s demand that the militant group immediately disarm, Mousa Abu Marzouk, a senior Hamas official, told Al Jazeera, the Qatari TV network, that it would only hand over its weapons “if the occupation ends and Palestinians can govern themselves”.
