BREAKING NEWS: ISRAEL AND HAMAS TO START FOUR-DAY TRUCE ON FRIDAY
ISRAEL AND HAMAS TO START FOUR-DAY TRUCE
ON
FRIDAY
Israel and Palestinian Islamist group Hamas will start a
four-day truce on Friday morning with the first batch of Israeli hostages
released later that day, mediators in Qatar said.
The agreement - the first in a brutal, near seven-week-old
war - would begin at 7 a.m. local time (0500 GMT) and involve a comprehensive
ceasefire in north and south Gaza, a spokesperson for Qatar's foreign ministry
said.
Aid would start flowing into Gaza, Israeli hostages would be
freed at 4 p.m. and it was expected that Palestinians would be released from
Israeli jails as part of the deal, ministry spokesperson Majed Al-Ansari told
reporters in Doha.
Hamas - who had been expected to declare a truce with Israel a day earlier on Thursday only for negotiations to drag on - confirmed on its Telegram channel that all hostilities from its forces would cease.
Israel has received an initial list of hostages to be
released from Gaza, planned to take place after a ceasefire with Hamas takes
hold on Friday, the Israeli prime minister's office said on Thursday.
Since then, more than 14,000 Gazans have been killed by
Israeli bombardment, around 40% of them children, according to health
authorities in the Hamas-ruled territory.
Israel has said the truce could last beyond the initial four
days as long as the militants free at least 10 hostages per day. A Palestinian
source has said a second wave of releases could see as many as 100 hostages go
free by the end of November.
Thirteen women and children will be released, according to a
spokesperson for Qatar’s foreign ministry, Majed Al-Ansari.
An undisclosed number of Palestinian prisoners are also set
to be released around 4 p.m. local time (9 a.m. ET), after the hostages are
freed from Gaza, the Qatari spokesperson said in a news conference.
The route the freed hostages will take cannot be disclosed
for safety reasons, Al-Ansari said in response to a question from CNN. Qatar
will be working closely on the operation with the Red Cross and “parties of the
conflict.”
The list of hostages expected to be released has been handed
to the Israeli intelligence service Mossad, and talks between all mediating
parties continued until this morning, Al-Ansari said.
Israel is "examining the details of the list and are in
the meantime communicating with all the families of the kidnapped," Ofir
Gendelman, the Israeli prime minister's spokesperson to the Arab world, wrote
on X, formerly Twitter.
Both sides have said they may go back to fighting once the
truce is over.
Meanwhile, Israel is working on getting the first group of
hostages out of Gaza, but "it's not without its challenges," Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Thursday.
"We hope to get this first tranche out, and then we're
committed to getting everyone out," Netanyahu said during his meeting with
British Foreign Secretary David Cameron.
"We will continue with our war aims, mainly to
eradicate Hamas," Netanyahu said.
"There is no hope for peace between Israel and the
Palestinians, and between Israel and the Arab states, if we don't eradicate
this murderous movement that threatens the future of all of us," he added.
Cameron is meeting with both Israeli and Palestinian leaders
about the crisis and the way forward, the United Kingdom's foreign office said
Thursday.
"He will discuss the need to get all hostages out of
Gaza and get more aid in, as well as the need to work towards a lasting
solution that delivers security and justice for Israelis and
Palestinians," the British foreign office said in a statement on social
media.
In another development, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said
it has arrested the director of Al-Shifa, Gaza's largest hospital.
Mohammad Abu Salmiya was detained for questioning
"following evidence that the Shifa Hospital, under his direct management,
served as a Hamas command and control center,"
Abu Salmiya was reportedly arrested while evacuating from
the embattled Al-Shifa hospital as part of a convoy marshalled by the World
Health Organization. In response to his arrest, the Hamas-run Ministry of
Health in Gaza said it had suspended cooperation with WHO and said the United
Nations "bears full responsibility" for his detention.
If all goes according to plan, by Friday evening the skies
in Gaza would have finally fallen silent, and some of the Israeli hostages
would have returned home to their loved ones.
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