Manas Dasgupta
NEW DELHI, Nov 24: With the Israel – Hamas truce coming into force on Friday, Hamas has released 25 hostages, including 13 Israelis and 12 Thai nationals, after nearly two months of confinement in Gaza.
Thailand Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin in a post on X confirmed in the evening that 12 Thai hostages have already been released by Hamas and that the Embassy officials were on the way to receive the freed hostages. “It has been confirmed by the Security Department and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that 12 Thai hostages have already been released. Embassy officials are on their way to pick them up in another hour. Their names and details should be known soon,” Mr Thavisin said.
Hamas, as part of a temporary ceasefire in Gaza, was initially scheduled to deliver a group of 13 Israeli hostages to neighbouring Egypt in return for 39 Palestinians in Israeli jails. With the 12 Thai nationals released, 25 people walked out of captivity after nearly two months. With just minutes to the 4 pm-prisoner swap, Thailand announced that 12 of its citizens are also being released in addition to the 13 Israelis.
Two Hamas sources said some of the hostages seized in the October 7 raids on Israel were on Friday handed over to the Red Cross for return to Israel, via Egypt. “Half an hour ago, the prisoners were handed to the Red Cross who will take them to the Egyptians” at the Rafah crossing, one of the sources said. “They were handed over to the Egyptian side,” the source added.
A source in the military wing of Hamas confirmed the handover, adding: “This is the first group under the agreement.” A first tranche of 13 women and children hostages were expected to go back to Israel on Friday after a ceasefire between Israeli and Hamas went into effect in the Gaza Strip in the morning.
Israel is set to release three times as many Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails — women and teenage boys — under the terms of the deal reach with Gaza’s Hamas rulers.
Hamas broke through Gaza’s militarised border with Israel on October 7 to kill, according to Israeli officials, about 1,200 people and seize around 240 Israeli and foreign hostages. Israel has vowed to “crush” Hamas in response and unleashed a withering military campaign that Gaza’s Hamas government says has killed nearly 15,000 people in the coastal territory.
Israel was eagerly awaiting what one official called the “miracle” release of women and children taken hostage by Palestinian militants during the deadliest attack in the country’s history. But the authorities were also gearing up for the complex task of helping those returning home from a nearly seven-week hostage ordeal that may have left them deeply traumatised.
Over the course of the four-day truce, which began at 7 a.m. (10.30 a.m. IST), at least 50 hostages are expected to be freed, with 150 Palestinians prisoners to be released in exchange.
Israeli forces withdrew from Gaza’s largest hospital Al-Shifa on Friday, the Hamas-run health ministry said, on the first day of a temporary truce between Israel and the Palestinian militants.
The Israeli military raided Al-Shifa last week, targeting what it said was a Hamas command centre in a tunnel complex beneath the medical facility. The Palestinian militant group and hospital officials have repeatedly denied the claim.
Al-Shifa has been a major focus of Israel’s ground offensive in the Gaza Strip following attacks by Hamas across southern Israel. Since the Israeli raid, many of the estimated 2,300 patients, staff and displaced civilians sheltering in the Al-Shifa complex have been evacuated to the south of the Gaza Strip.
But the World Health Organization was “extremely concerned” about the safety of the estimated 100 patients and health workers remaining at Al-Shifa, spokesman Christian Lindmeier said.
Hamas health ministry spokesman Ashraf al-Qudra, said the Israeli military had withdrawn but the people remaining at Al-Shifa were in a battered complex whose “main generator is destroyed along with numerous buildings.” “We’re working on further evacuations from hospitals as soon as possible,” said Lindmeier, with recent Israeli operations focusing on the Indonesian Hospital, another medical facility in northern Gaza.
Taking advantage of the four-day truce, thousands of displaced Gazans with children and pets in their arms and their belongings loaded onto donkey carts or car roofs, headed home on Friday. The din of war was replaced by the horns of traffic jams and sirens of ambulances making their way through crowds emerging from hospitals and schools where they had taken refuge.
For nearly seven weeks, Israeli strikes on the Gaza Strip had been relentless. But on Friday morning, no more shots were heard in Khan Yunis, in the south of the Palestinian territory. Hayat al-Muammar was among those hurrying to take advantage of the truce deal. “I’m going home,” said the 50-year-old, who had been sheltering in a school. “We fled the death, destruction and everything,” she said.
The lives of Gazans have been turned upside down since militant group Hamas, which rules the Palestinian territory, launched an unprecedented attack on Israel on October 7. Weeks of sustained Israeli bombardment in response has killed nearly 15,000 people, around two thirds of them women and children, Gaza’s Hamas government says.
Some 1.7 million of the territory’s 2.4 million people are estimated to have been displaced, and more than half of homes damaged or destroyed, the United Nations has stated.
Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, however, made it clear on Friday that the truce under way with Hamas in Gaza was a “short pause”, after which Israel would resume operating with full military force.
Mr Gallant made the remarks to his Italian counterpart who was on a visit to Tel Aviv, according to his office. “There will be a short pause and then we will continue operating with full military power. We will not stop until we achieve our goals: the destruction of Hamas and bringing home the hostages from Gaza to Israel – there are 240 hostages and it is something we cannot accept and cannot tolerate,” Mr Gallant said.
Meanwhile, the Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi said on Friday that a future Palestinian state could be demilitarised and have a temporary international security presence to provide guarantees to both it and to Israel.
“We said that we are ready for this state to be demilitarised, and there can also be guarantees of forces, whether NATO forces, United Nations forces, or Arab or American forces, until we achieve security for both states, the nascent Palestinian state and the Israeli state,” Mr Sisi said during a joint news conference in Cairo with Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez and Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo.
A political resolution which requires a Palestinian state based on the June 4, 1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital, has remained out of reach, Sisi added. Arab nations have rejected suggestions that an Arab force provide security in the Gaza Strip after the end of Israel’s current military operation there against the Palestinian militant group Hamas, which has controlled Gaza since 2007.
Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi told reporters in London this week that Arab states would not want to go into a Gaza Strip that could be turned into a “wasteland” by Israel’s military offensive. “What are the circumstances under which any of us would want to go and be seen as the enemy and be seen as having come to clean up Israel’s mess?” he said.