DOHA, Qatar—Key negotiators in an agreement to free Israeli hostages and pause the fighting in Gaza said the deal would take effect Friday morning, even as the parties raced to overcome sticking points to the arrangement weeks in the making.
Qatar’s Foreign Ministry said a temporary cease-fire would begin at 7 a.m. local time Friday. In return, an initial group of 13 hostages, all women and children held by Hamas, would be freed around 4 p.m. the same day, said Foreign Ministry spokesman Majed al-Ansari. A group of Palestinian prisoners, also women and children, would be released around the same time and humanitarian aid would flow into the enclave, he added.
“We are hoping that we don’t see any delays. I think we’ve reached a point now where everything is in place and we’re ready to go on the ground,” Ansari said during a news conference in Doha. He said that the Qataris were setting up an operations room to monitor the cease-fire and communicate with the parties to the conflict and the International Committee of the Red Cross.
The announcement came after the deal, which was approved by Israel and Hamas earlier this week, stumbled over logistical issues relating to the details of the first people to be exchanged.
Senior Egyptian officials blamed that setback on last-minute demands from Hamas and its failure to hand over a list of the first group of hostages it planned to release. Ansari declined to address what caused the delay, but said the list of the initial hostages to be released was handed over on Thursday. Israel’s prime minister’s office also said it had received and was checking an initial list of names and was currently in contact with the families of those hostages to be released.
Officials from Qatar, Egypt, Israel and the U.S. are still pushing to work out the deal’s implementation, including the finer details of what happens to the hostages once they are out of Hamas’s hands and to those left behind. Also still at issue is the route the hostages would take into Israel.
The White House said it was hopeful that the release of hostages would begin Friday morning. “The deal was agreed and remains agreed. The parties are working out final logistical details, particularly for the first day of implementation,” White House National Security Council spokeswoman Adrienne Watson said Thursday.
“Our primary objective is to ensure that they are brought home safely,” Watson said. The White House has previously said at least three Americans are among the hostages expected to be released in the deal.
Egypt said it continued to work with all the parties involved and expected the agreement to come into force by Friday. Meanwhile, Israel pressed its military operation in Gaza, hitting hundreds of targets across the strip.
The last-minute wrangling showed the fragility of the agreement, the first major diplomatic breakthrough in the seven-week-old war between Israel and Hamas. While negotiators said the final obstacles seemed surmountable, the last mile to the eventual handover appears lined with hurdles.
“We hope to get our hostages out, there are many challenges along the way,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Thursday during a meeting with British Foreign Secretary David Cameron.
The broad terms of the agreement outlined a four-day pause in the fighting in Gaza and the release of 50 hostages by Hamas in exchange for 150 Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails. All those swapped would be women and children. The deal calls for the hostages to be released in smaller groups each day over the course of four days and reserves the right to extend the pause if more hostages are freed.
Senior Egyptian officials said Hamas failed to formally sign off on the mechanism for the hostages’ release and didn’t provide Israel with a specific list of around a dozen or more to be freed first. The two sides already reviewed the full list of 50 people set for release, including their names, ages and genders.
According to negotiators, Hamas asked Israel for a list of the first group of Palestinian prisoners to be released so it could inform their families. When Israel turned down the request, Hamas refused to share the list of hostages it plans to hand over on the first day. Ansari, the Qatari Foreign Ministry spokesman, said Thursday that the lists of hostages and prisoners to be swapped would be exchanged daily.
Another technical issue gumming up the process is access by the Red Cross to the released hostages, and negotiations over the exit through which they would leave Gaza, according to officials familiar with the situation. As well as its border with Israel, Gaza also shares a frontier with Egypt.
Israel had wanted the hostages to be handed over to the Red Cross before their transfer to Israel, while Hamas is now asking for them to be given directly to Egypt, the officials said. Israel has also asked that the Red Cross be given access to those hostages who remain in Gaza after the first exchange, something Hamas hasn’t agreed to.
Ansari said the hostages would be handed over to the Red Cross, without elaborating.
“It constitutes the first glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel for this conflict,” he said of the deal.
Egypt and Qatar, which are mediating in the talks, late Wednesday decided to delay the release by 24 hours to resolve the remaining issues, according to people familiar with the talks.
Negotiators were working on Thursday to resolve the logistical issues and remained hopeful that the deal would be set in motion by Friday, according to one official familiar with the talks.
A White House official said parties involved in the hostage-release deal are working out “final logistical details” for the first day of the agreement’s implementation. Adrienne Watson, a spokeswoman for the White House’s National Security Council, said that the hostage release was on track and that the U.S. was hopeful the deal would begin to be implemented on Friday morning.
Separately, Israel continued to trade fire with militants in Lebanon, where there are fears of a full-blown second front in the war. Israeli Army Radio reported that dozens of rockets were fired from Lebanon in the largest barrage from the country since the war began last month.
The Israeli military said it responded with artillery fire after militants in Lebanon fired missiles into Israeli territory. Hezbollah said overnight that Israeli bombing killed the son of a senior member of parliament affiliated with the Lebanon-based Islamist group.
Meanwhile, Israel’s military offensive in Gaza continued on Thursday following the last-minute delay to the hostage-release deal. “Operations against Hamas continuing in all arenas, air, land, and sea,” said Richard Hecht, a spokesman for the Israeli military.
Israeli warplanes bombed Nuseirat refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip and destroyed a municipal building in al-Qarara, a town in the territory’s south, according to Palestinian media.
The Israeli military said it had struck more than 300 targets in Gaza over the past day, including operational headquarters, underground tunnels and weapons-manufacturing sites. In northern Gaza’s Jabalia area, an Israeli drone hit armed Palestinian militants who approached Israeli forces, the Israeli military said.
In northern Gaza, some 450 patients and staff evacuated the Indonesian Hospital overnight, according to a statement from Munir al-Borsh, a director-general at the health ministry in the Hamas-run enclave. There are 72 dead bodies in the hospital, including 60 in the facility’s courtyard, and the hospital also remains without food, water and adequate medical supplies, the health official said.
“We are still besieged at this moment in the hospital, and we have pledged not to leave until all the injured and sick leave with us, because if we leave them, their fate will inevitably be death,” said Borsh.
Israel’s military didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Earlier this week the Israeli military said its forces operating in the area had responded to fire from inside the hospital. Israel has said Hamas militants are operating in hospitals across the strip.
Israeli forces on Thursday said they had arrested the director of Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital, Mohamed Abu Salmiya. He was stopped at an Israeli military checkpoint while traveling in a United Nations convoy evacuating patients and staff from the facility, according to a spokesman for the Health Ministry in Gaza.
The Israeli military said Salmiya had been sent for questioning following what it said was “evidence showing that the Shifa Hospital, under his direct management, served as a Hamas command and control center.”
Salmiya couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.
Israeli forces raided the hospital earlier this month in search of militants and weapons. The military later said it found AK-47s and a laptop inside the hospital that it said were evidence of a command center. It also said it found a Hamas tunnel underneath the hospital.
The allegations about the hospital and resulting military operation at the facility have been at the center of a debate around Israel’s contention that Hamas uses civilian infrastructure for its operations. While many security analysts agree the latest evidence Israel has released increasingly suggests a Hamas presence at the hospital, most say they have yet to see something that constitutes a smoking gun showing it was a command center for Hamas, as Israel has alleged.
More than 14,000 Palestinians, the majority of them women and children, have been killed since Israel launched its military offensive in Gaza on Oct. 7, according to authorities there. The figure doesn’t distinguish between civilians and militants. Israeli bombing has flattened entire apartment buildings, while Israel also cut off most supplies of food and water to the enclave.
Israel launched its current operation in Gaza in response to a Hamas attack in which militants killed more than 1,200 people inside Israel, most of them civilians, on Oct. 7. Hundreds of Hamas gunmen poured into Israel during the attack, killing partygoers at a music festival and residents of communities neighboring Gaza.
Ken Thomas contributed to this article.
Write to Jared Malsin at [email protected] and Summer Said at [email protected]
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