A truce in the war between Israel and Hamas appears to extend into a fifth day as the two sides completed their fourth release of Gaza captives in exchange for Palestinians held in Israeli prisons under an original truce deal of four days, while the mediators declared that the process would continue.
Qatar, which along with Egypt facilitated indirect negotiations between Israel and Hamas, said there was an agreement to extend by two days the initial four-day truce that was due to expire on Monday.
“We have an extension… of two more days,” Qatar’s Ambassador to the United Nations, Alya Ahmed Saif Al-Thani, told reporters Monday after a closed-door meeting of the Security Council. the UN, saying both sides would release more people.
“This is a very positive step,” Al-Thani said.
While the Israeli government had not yet officially confirmed the extension of the truce as of Tuesday morning, Israeli Army Radio, citing the prime minister’s office, reported that a new list of captives – expected to be released later in the day – had been received. .
Israel said it would extend the ceasefire by one day for every ten additional captives released by Hamas.
Local news site Axios reported that the latest list contained the names of 10 Israeli captives. There was no immediate comment from the Israeli prime minister’s office.
Israel said Monday that 11 Israelis had been returned to the country from the Gaza Strip, bringing to 69 the total number of Israeli and foreign captives released by Hamas since Friday as part of the truce.
The Israeli Prison Service said 33 Palestinian prisoners were also released Monday from Israel’s Ofer prison in the West Bank and a detention center in Jerusalem, bringing the total number of Palestinians released since Friday to 150.
The freed Palestinian prisoners were greeted with loud cheers as the Red Cross bus they were traveling in passed through the streets of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank.
The original truce agreement also allowed more aid trucks to arrive in Gaza, where the civilian population faces shortages of food, fuel, clean water and medicine.
While describing the extension of the truce as “a glimpse of hope and humanity”, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said two additional days were not enough to meet aid needs from Gaza.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) said in a report on Monday that the four-day pause in hostilities had allowed humanitarian aid groups, particularly Red Crescent workers, to provide assistance to people in desperate need across Gaza where 1.8 million people have been killed. people are displaced within the country.
More than 14,800 people have been killed in Gaza – including some 10,000 women and children – since Israel launched its attacks on the Palestinian enclave following the Hamas raid on southern Israel on October 7, which killed around 1,200 people.
Israel’s intense bombardment of the densely populated Gaza Strip has also resulted in the destruction of 46,000 homes and more than 234,000 damages, or about 60 percent of Gaza’s entire housing stock, the agency said. UN in the report.
Despite the apparent extension of the truce by two more days, Israel remains determined to crush Hamas militarily and has warned that its war on Gaza will resume.
The resumption will likely see Israeli forces expand their air, land and sea offensive from devastated northern Gaza to the southern enclave where hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have fled seeking refuge.