Handover of 3 Israeli hostages underway as Gaza ceasefire begins
3 women reported to be on their way to IDF forces
Israeli television has shown images of three hostages being handed over to the Red Cross as part of a ceasefire deal that pauses a 15-month-old war that has brought devastation and seismic political change to the Middle East.
The Israeli military said the hostages, held by Hamas militants since Oct. 7, 2023, were making their way to the Israeli Defence Forces and Shin Bet security officials in Gaza.
The Red Cross said the hostages are in good health. A large crowd gathered in a public square in Tel Aviv, Israel, to watch a screen showing scenes of the transfer in Gaza City.
This is a breaking news update. A previous version of the story follows below.
A ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip took effect on Sunday after a nearly three-hour delay, pausing a 15-month-old war that has brought devastation and seismic political change to the Middle East.
Residents and a medical worker in Gaza said that they had heard no new fighting or military strikes since about half an hour before it was finally implemented.
Israeli airstrikes and artillery attacks killed 13 Palestinians between 8:30 a.m. local time, when the 42-day ceasefire was meant to begin, and 11:15 a.m. local time, when it actually took effect, Palestinian medics said.
Israel blamed Hamas for the delay after the Palestinian militant group failed to provide a list naming the first three hostages to be released under the deal.
Hamas attributed the delay to "technical field reasons," without specifying what those were.
A Palestinian official familiar with the matter, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the delay occurred because mediators had asked for 48 hours of "calm" before the ceasefire's implementation, but continued Israeli strikes right up until the deadline had made it difficult to send the list.
Two hours after the deadline, Hamas said it had sent the list of names, and Israeli officials confirmed receipt. Hamas named the hostages it was to release on Sunday as Romi Gonen, Doron Steinbrecher and Emily Damari.
Israel did not immediately confirm the names. However, one of the groups representing the families of hostages in Gaza, the Hostage and Missing Families Forum, said it welcomes the news of their expected release and released short profiles of the three women.
Steinbrecher, 31, and Damari, a 28-year-old Israeli-British dual citizen, were taken from their homes in the Kfar Aza kibbutz in southern Israel. Gonen, 24, who's from the town of Kfar Vradim in northern Israel, was kidnapped from the Nova music festival in the desert near the Gaza-Israel border.
The highly anticipated ceasefire deal could help usher in an end to the war, which began after Hamas, which controls Gaza, attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing some 1,200 people, according to Israeli authorities. A further 400 Israeli soldiers have been killed in combat in Gaza, Israel says.
Israel's response has reduced much of Gaza to rubble and killed nearly 47,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza-based health authorities.
The war also set off a confrontation throughout the Middle East between Israel and its arch-foe Iran, which backs Hamas and other anti-Israeli and anti-American paramilitary forces across the region.
Israeli military spokespeople said in separate statements on Sunday that their aircraft and artillery had attacked "terror targets" in northern and central Gaza, and that the military would continue to attack the strip as long as Hamas did not meet its obligations under the ceasefire.
The Palestinian Civil Emergency Service said that at least 13 people were killed in the Israeli attacks and dozens wounded. Medics reported tanks firing at the Zeitoun area of Gaza City, and said that an airstrike and tank fire also hit the northern town of Beit Hanoun, sending residents who had returned there in anticipation of the ceasefire fleeing.
An air raid siren that sounded in the Sderot area of southern Israel had been a false alarm, the Israeli military said in a separate statement.
Aid flowing, Palestinians returning home
Israeli forces had started withdrawing from areas in Gaza's Rafah to the Philadelphi corridor along the border between Egypt and Gaza, pro-Hamas media reported early on Sunday.
Long lines of trucks carrying fuel and aid supplies queued up at border crossings in the hours before the ceasefire was due to take effect. The World Food Program said its trucks began to cross on Sunday morning.
The deal requires 600 truckloads of aid to be allowed into Gaza every day of the initial six-week ceasefire, including 50 carrying fuel. Half of the 600 aid trucks would be delivered to Gaza's north, where experts have warned famine is imminent.
Palestinians displaced by the fighting could be seen returning to Rafah in southern Gaza, including 26-year-old Mohamed Abdo.
"I want to see my home; it's all dust," he told CBC News. "We were in misery for a year and three months and we were humiliated, and we were displaced, to not one but 10 places."
The three-stage ceasefire agreement followed months of on-off negotiations brokered by Egypt, Qatar and the United States, and came just ahead of the Jan. 20 inauguration of U.S. president-elect Donald Trump.
Its first stage will last six weeks, during which 33 of the remaining 98 hostages — women, children, men over 50, the ill and wounded -— will be released in return for almost 2,000 Palestinian prisoners and detainees.
They include 737 male, female and teenage prisoners, some of whom are members of militant groups convicted of attacks that killed dozens of Israelis, as well as hundreds of Palestinians from Gaza in detention since the start of the war.
Hamas is set to release the first three female hostages as part of the deal, to the Red Cross, in exchange for the planned release of 90 Palestinian prisoners.
Guards could be seen standing outside the Sheba Medical Center, also known as Tel HaShomer Hospital, where the hostages were expected to be assessed, in Ramat Gan, on the outskirts of Tel Aviv.
Under the terms of the deal, Hamas will inform the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) where the meeting point will be inside Gaza and the ICRC is expected to begin driving to that location to collect the hostages, an official involved in the process told Reuters.
U.S. President Joe Biden's team worked closely with Trump's Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff to push the deal over the line.
As his inauguration approaches, Trump has repeated his demand that a deal be done swiftly, warning repeatedly that there would be "hell to pay" if the hostages were not released.
But what will come next in Gaza remains unclear in the absence of a comprehensive agreement on the postwar future of the enclave, which will require billions of dollars and years of work to rebuild.
And although the stated aim of the ceasefire is to end the war entirely, it could easily unravel.
Hamas, which has controlled Gaza for almost two decades, has survived despite losing its top leadership and thousands of fighters.
Israel has vowed it will not allow Hamas to return to power and has cleared large stretches of ground inside Gaza, in a step widely seen as a move toward creating a buffer zone that will allow its troops to act freely against threats in the enclave.
In Israel, the return of the hostages may ease some of the public anger against Netanyahu and his right-wing government over the Oct. 7 security failure that led to the deadliest single day in the country's history.
The war sent shock waves across the region, triggering a conflict with the Tehran-backed Lebanese Hezbollah movement and bringing Israel into direct conflict with its arch-foe Iran for the first time.
It has also transformed the Middle East. Iran, which spent billions building up a network of militant groups around Israel, has seen its "Axis of Resistance" wrecked and was unable to inflict more than minimal damage on Israel in two major missile attacks.
Hezbollah, whose huge missile arsenal was once seen as the biggest threat to Israel, has seen its its top leadership killed and most of its missiles and military infrastructure destroyed.
On the diplomatic front, Israel has faced outrage and isolation over the death and devastation in Gaza.
Netanyahu faces an International Criminal Court arrest warrant on war crimes allegations and separate accusations of genocide at the International Court of Justice.
Israel has reacted with fury to both cases, rejecting the charges as politically motivated and accusing South Africa, which brought the original ICJ case as well as the countries that have joined it, of antisemitism.
With files from CBC News