Hamas freed 17 hostages held in Gaza, including a four-year-old American girl, yesterday while Israel was also seen releasing prisoners on the third day of their truce.
The International Committee of the Red Cross said it had successfully transferred 17 hostages from Gaza. Hamas said it had handed over 13 Israelis, three Thais and one with Russian citizenship.
Reuters TV footage showed Palestinians being freed from Israeli prisons.
The release of some of the hostages was mirrored by the freeing of Palestinian prisoners, the International Red Cross said. The organisation said it was involved in releasing 19 of them although the total figure remains unclear.
Hamas said it wanted to extend the truce if serious efforts were made to increase the number of Palestinian detainees released by Israel.
US President Joe Biden said he hoped the pause in fighting can go on as long as prisoners are getting released. He hoped more Americans would be released by Hamas although he did not have firm news.
Biden said the four-year-old hostage, Abigail Edan, had witnessed her parents being killed during the Hamas raid on October 7 and had been held since then.
The four-day truce is the first halt in fighting in the seven weeks since Hamas killed 1,200 people and took about 240 hostages back into Gaza.
In response to that attack, Israel has vowed to destroy the Hamas who run Gaza, bombarding the enclave and mounting a ground offensive in the north. More than 15,000 Palestinians have been killed, Gaza health authorities say, and hundreds of thousands displaced.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu yesterday met security forces inside the Gaza Strip. He also said he spoke to Biden about the hostage release, adding that he would welcome extending a temporary truce if it meant that on every additional day 10 captives would be freed.
However Netanyahu said he also told Biden that, at the end of the truce, “we will return with full force to achieve our goals: The elimination of Hamas, ensuring that Gaza does return to what it was; and of course the release of all our hostages.”
The killing of a Palestinian farmer in the central Gaza Strip had earlier added to concerns over the fragility of the truce.
The farmer was killed when targeted by Israeli forces east of Gaza’s long-established Maghazi refugee camp, the Palestinian Red Crescent said.
The armed wing of Hamas also said that four of its military commanders in the Gaza Strip had been killed, including the commander of the North Gaza brigade, Ahmad Al Ghandour. It did not say when they had been killed.
Qatar, Egypt and the US are pressing for the truce to be extended beyond today but it is not clear whether that will happen.
Israel had said the ceasefire could be extended if Hamas continued to release at least 10 hostages a day. A Palestinian source had said up to 100 hostages could go free.
Six of the group of 13 Israelis released on Saturday were women and seven were teenagers or children. The youngest was three-year-old Yahel Shoham, freed with her mother and brother, although her father remains a hostage.
Israel freed 39 Palestinians – six women and 33 teenagers – from two prisons, the Palestinian news agency WAFA said.
Some of the Palestinians arrived at Al Bireh Municipality Square in Ramallah in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where thousands of citizens awaited them, a Reuters journalist said.
Violence flared in the West Bank where Israeli forces killed seven Palestinians, including two minors and at least one gunman, late on Saturday and early yesterday, medics and local sources said.
Even before the October 7 attacks, the West Bank had been in a state of unrest, with a rise in Israeli army raids, Palestinian attacks, and violence by Israeli settlers in the past 18 months. More than 200 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank since October 7, some in Israeli air strikes.
Saturday’s swap followed the previous day’s initial release of 13 Israeli hostages, including children and the elderly, by Hamas in return for the release of 39 Palestinian women and teenagers from Israeli prisons.
The four Thais freed on Saturday “want a shower and to contact their relatives”, Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin said on social media platform X. All were safe and showed few ill-effects, he said.
“I’m so happy, I’m so glad, I can’t describe my feeling at all,” Thongkoon Onkaew told Reuters by telephone after news of the release of her son Natthaporn, 26, the family’s sole breadwinner.
The deal risked being derailed when Hamas’ armed wing said on Saturday it was delaying releases until Israel met all truce conditions, including committing to let aid trucks into northern Gaza.
Saving the deal took a day of diplomacy mediated by Qatar and Egypt, which President Biden also joined.
Hamas’ Al Qassam Brigades also said Israel had failed to respect terms for the release of Palestinian prisoners that factored in their time in detention.
COGAT, the Israeli agency for civilian co-ordination with the Palestinians, accused Hamas itself of delaying trucks trying to deliver humanitarian aid to northern Gaza at a checkpoint.
Saturday also brought hours of waiting for the families of hostages, some of whose joy was tempered by the continued captivity of others.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Iranian counterpart Ebrahim Raisi discussed on a call the importance of Muslim countries, especially Türkiye and Iran, taking a common stance against “Israeli brutality in the Palestinian territories.”
“Israel’s unlawful attacks on Gaza, humanitarian aid efforts for Palestinians and possible measures towards a permanent ceasefire in the region were discussed.”
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