The latest:
- First group of hostages released by Hamas.
- 4-day pause in fighting between Hamas and Israel began early Friday.
- As many as 39 Palestinians could be freed from Israeli custody.
- Thai prime minister says 12 Thai workers have also been released from captivity in Gaza.
- Aids trucks are seen crossing into Gaza at the Rafah crossing at Egypt.
More than a dozen Israelis who have been held captive in the Gaza Strip for nearly seven weeks were released on Friday, according to local media and government officials, becoming the first group of captives freed under a long-awaited exchange agreement between Israel and Hamas.
Hamas freed a total of 13 women and children and handed them over to the Red Cross, Israeli media and the Egyptian government said.
Twelve Thai nationals were also released Friday, according to Thai Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin. An Israeli official confirmed that the Thai captives left Gaza and were en route to a hospital in Israel. Their release had not previously been announced as one of the terms of the prisoner swap.
The official spoke on condition of anonymity because she was not authorized to discuss the releases with the media.
In all, 50 captives had been expected to be freed during a four-day truce. It was not clear if the Thai hostages were included in that.
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The cease-fire is the first respite in 48 days of conflict that has devastated the Palestinian enclave, but both sides warned that the war was far from over.
No big bombings, artillery strikes or rocket attacks were reported, although Hamas and Israel both accused each other of sporadic violations.
The ceasefire began at 7 a.m. local time (midnight ET). The group released by Hamas on Friday was expected to be flown home under military guard.
In exchange, Israel was due to release the first 39 Palestinians from its jails on Friday, among them 24 women and 15 teenagers.
Additional aid is to flow into Gaza, which has been gripped by a humanitarian crisis under weeks of Israeli bombardment that has killed thousands of Palestinians.
The hostages were expected to be released to the Red Cross and an Egyptian security delegation that travelled to Gaza on Thursday, then brought out through Egypt for transfer to Israel, Egyptian security sources said.
According to Israeli tallies, about 240 people were taken hostage when Hamas, designated a terrorist organization by several Western countries, launched a siege in southern Israel on Oct. 7. Prior to Friday, four of the hostages had been released.
Ismail Haniyeh, the leader of Hamas, said on Friday in a recording that the group is committed to the truce and hostage swap deal as long as Israel is committed as well.
Fuel, aid trucks enter Gaza
Egypt said it was maintaining contact with Israel and Hamas to consolidate the truce and prevent violations.
Reuters journalists saw Israeli tanks moving away from the Gaza Strip at the northern end, and aid trucks rolling in from Egypt at the southern end. There was no sound of Israeli air force activity above northern Gaza, nor any of the contrails typically left by Palestinian rocketfire.
Under the agreement, desperately-needed aid began to be delivered to Gaza. By mid-morning, 60 trucks carrying aid had crossed from Egypt at the Rafah border point, according to Gaza border authorities.
Egypt has said 130,000 litres of diesel and four trucks of gas will be delivered daily to Gaza and that 200 trucks of aid would enter Gaza daily.
Israel’s COGAT agency, which co-ordinates with the Palestinians on civilian affairs, said four tanks of fuel and four tanks of cooking gas were transferred from Egypt to UN humanitarian groups in southern Gaza via Rafah.
“The United Nations can confirm that as I speak trucks with humanitarian supplies continues to cross into Gaza through the Rafah crossing point,” said Jens Laerke, spokesperson for OCHA.
Asked whether the United Nations had guarantees from Israel that it could deliver aid to the north, Laerke said: “We proceed on the basis of the hope and the expectation that we will reach people in need, where they are.”
Sirens, but signs of more people outside
Egyptian authorities said some Palestinians stuck in Egypt were starting to return to the Gaza Strip through the Rafah crossing.
People in southern Gaza who had evacuated homes in the early days of the war to shelters deeper west, started to go to their home areas to check on their houses.
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In Khan Younis, a town in southern Gaza housing thousands of families displaced from the north, streets filled with people venturing out of home and shelters.
Sirens sounded in two Israeli villages outside the southern Gaza Strip, warning of possible incoming Palestinian rockets. An Israeli government spokesperson said Hamas had fired rockets in violation of the truce but there were no immediate reports of damage.
The Israeli military also told Palestinians not to try to return to homes in the northern part of Gaza, which it described as a “dangerous war zone.”
Israel launched its assault on Gaza after Hamas fighters burst across the border fence into southern Israel on Oct. 7, killing 1,200 people, including several Canadians.
Since then, Israel has bombarded the Hamas-ruled enclave, killing some 14,000 Gazans, around 40 per cent of them children, according to Palestinian health authorities.
Hundreds of thousands of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have fled their homes to escape the violence as conditions grew ever more desperate, with food, drinking water, fuel and other basic supplies running short.
Hamas confirmed that all hostilities from its forces would cease. But Abu Ubaida, spokesperson for Hamas’s armed wing, later stressed that this was a “temporary truce.”
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In a video message, he called for an “escalation of the confrontation with [Israel] on all resistance fronts,” including the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
The Israeli military also said fighting would resume soon.
“This will be a short pause, at the conclusion of which the war [and] fighting will continue with great might and will generate pressure for the return of more hostages,” Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said, according to a Defence Ministry statement.
Fighting had raged in the hours leading up to the truce, with officials inside the enclave saying a hospital in Gaza City was among the targets bombed.
The Indonesian Hospital was operating without light and filled with bedridden old people and children too weak to be moved, Gaza health officials said. Al-Jazeera quoted Mounir El Barsh, the Gaza health ministry director, as saying a patient, a wounded woman, was killed and three others injured.
There was no immediate comment from Israel on the reported incident.