Israel and Hamas began a long-awaited four-day truce on Friday.
At the end of the day, militants are expected to release 13 Israeli women and children taken hostage and in return, aid will begin flowing into besieged Gaza, marking the first ceasefire in a war that has lasted nearly seven weeks.
The truce began at 7 a.m. (0500 GMT), called for a comprehensive ceasefire in northern and southern Gaza and was to be accompanied by the release of some of the more than 200 hostages taken by Hamas during the Islamist attack on Israel on 7 October. In exchange, several Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails were to be released.
On the eve of the truce, fighting continued for several hours. Officials from the Hamas-run enclave said a hospital in Gaza City was among the targets bombed. Both sides also signalled that the truce would be temporary, pending renewed fighting.
The Gaza Health Ministry reports that an Indonesian hospital was destroyed by relentless Israeli bombardment, was operating without light and was overcrowded with bedridden old people and children too weak to be moved. Al Jazeera quoted Munir El-Barsh, director of Gaza’s health ministry, as saying one patient, a wounded woman, had died and three others were injured.
Qatar’s foreign ministry spokesperson Majed al-Ansari in Doha said more aid would start flowing into Gaza at 4 p.m. (1400 GMT) and the first hostages, including elderly women, would be released within four days, bringing the total number to 50.
Egypt said that 200 truckloads of humanitarian aid would enter Gaza daily after the truce began, as well as 130,000 litres of diesel and four truckloads of gas per day.
A Qatari spokesman told the media that Palestinians would be released from Israeli prisons. He said:
“We all hope that this truce will lead to a chance to start a wider work to achieve a permanent truce.”
Hamas confirmed on its Telegram channel that all fighting by its forces was ceasing. But Abu Ubaida, a spokesman for Hamas’ armed wing, later called “this a temporary truce” in a video message in which he called for an “escalation of confrontation with (Israel) on all resistance fronts,” including the Israeli-occupied West Bank, which has seen a surge in violence since the Gaza war began nearly seven weeks ago.
The Israeli military said its troops would remain behind the ceasefire line in the Gaza Strip. Israeli military spokesperson Daniel Hagari said:
“These will be complicated days and nothing is certain. Control over northern Gaza is the first step of a long war, and we are preparing for the next stages.”
The Prime Minister’s Office said Israel had received an initial list of hostages to be released and was in contact with their families.
Israel began daily airstrikes on Gaza after Hamas militants breached the border fence on 7 October, killing 1,200 people and taking about 240 hostages, according to Israeli authorities. The fighting killed about 14,000 Gazans, about 40 per cent of them children.
