Palestinians receive food parcels after aid trucks entered from the Karem Abu Salem crossing, in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip. Photo / Omar Al-Qatta, AFP
Hamas said it had finished preparations for freeing its remaining living hostages, which Israel expects to take place early Monday, fulfilling a key step in Donald Trump’s Gaza plan hours before he hosts a peace summit in Egypt.
Under the US President’s proposal, once the Palestinian militants have handed over the hostages, Israel is expected to begin releasing around 2000 detainees in exchange.
But negotiators were still wrangling Sunday over the final arrangements, with two Hamas sources telling AFP the group was insisting that Israel include seven senior Palestinian leaders on the list of those to be released.
Shosh Bedrosian, a spokeswoman for Israeli Premier Benjamin Netanyahu’s office, said the hostage release “will begin early Monday morning”, with Israel “expecting all 20 of our living hostages to be released together at one time”.
Trump is set to arrive in Israel shortly after the expected release, and will address the Israeli Parliament before heading to Egypt to host a meeting of world leaders to back his plan to end the two-year-old Gaza war and promote Middle East peace.
“Palestinian prisoners will be released once Israel has confirmation that all of our hostages set to be released tomorrow are across the border into Israel,” Bedrosian said.
During a previous truce, the identification of deceased hostages was only confirmed after autopsies at Israel’s Abu Kabir Forensic Institute.
Two Hamas sources, meanwhile, told AFP the group was insisting Israel free seven prominent Palestinian figures as part of the exchange – at least one of whom Israel has previously rejected.
“Hamas insists that the final list include seven senior leaders, most notably Marwan Barghouti, Ahmad Saadat, Ibrahim Hamed, and Abbas Al-Sayyed,” one source said, a claim confirmed by the other. Both spoke on condition of anonymity.
The source said that the group and its allies had nevertheless “completed all preparations” for handing over to Israel all the living hostages held in Gaza.
Under the terms of the plan, Hamas is to release the remaining 47 hostages – living and dead – who were abducted on October 7, 2023, during the brutal cross-border Hamas assault that left 1219 people dead, most of them civilians, and triggered Israel’s devastating campaign in Gaza.
Hamas is also expected to hand over remains of a soldier killed in 2014 during a previous Gaza war.
Among the Palestinian prisoners to be released, 250 are security detainees, including many convicted of killing Israelis, while about 1700 were arrested by the Israeli army in Gaza during the war.
After his Israel visit, Trump and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi will chair a summit of leaders from more than 20 countries in the Egyptian Red Sea resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh.
The Egyptian presidency said the meeting will aim “to end the war in the Gaza Strip, enhance efforts to achieve peace and stability in the Middle East, and usher in a new era of regional security”.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has said he will attend, as has Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer, his counterparts from Italy and Spain, Giorgia Meloni and Pedro Sanchez, and French President Emmanuel Macron.
No Israeli nor Hamas officials will be present, officials from both camps confirmed.
The third day of the ceasefire saw some aid trucks cross into Gaza, but residents in Khan Yunis, in the south of the Strip, said some shipments were being ransacked by starving residents in chaotic scenes that saw food parcels trampled.
For Mahmud al-Muzain, a bystander, the scuffle showed that Gazans did not trust that the US-led negotiations would lead to a long-term peace.
“Everyone fears the war will return,” he told AFP. “We stockpile food out of fear and worry that the war will come back.”
Since the ceasefire in the territory took hold, many displaced residents, like 38-year-old Fatima Salem, have been returning to devastated homes.
“My eyes kept searching for landmarks I had lost – nothing looked the same, even the neighbours’ houses were gone,” she said.
“I missed the smell of my home, even if it’s now just rubble. We will pitch a tent next to it and wait for reconstruction.”
Despite the apparent breakthrough in negotiations, mediators still have the tricky task of securing a longer-term political solution that will see Hamas hand over its weapons.
A Hamas source close to the group’s negotiating committee told AFP on Sunday that it would not participate in post-war Gaza governance but he pushed back on calls for Hamas to lay down its weapons.
“Hamas agrees to a long-term truce, and for its weapons not to be used at all during this period, except in the event of an Israeli attack on Gaza,” the source said.
Under the Trump plan, as Israel conducts a partial withdrawal from Gaza, it will be replaced by a multi-national force coordinated by a US-led command centre in Israel.
Israel’s campaign in Gaza has killed at least 67,806 people, according to the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory, figures the United Nations considers credible.
The data does not distinguish between civilians and combatants but indicates that more than half of the dead are women and children.
-Agence France-Presse