Israel releases 30 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for 10 Israeli hostages, according to mediator Qatar.
Hamas has released 12 more hostages, the Israeli military and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) have said, as a shaky truce continues to hold in Gaza.
The ICRC said that it successfully facilitated the release and transfer of 12 hostages out of Gaza via the Rafah crossing with Egypt on Tuesday, the fifth day of an extended six-day truce between Israel and the Palestinian armed group in Gaza.
The Israeli army said 10 Israelis and two Thai nationals had arrived in Israel.
In exchange for the release of the 10 Israelis, 30 Palestinian prisoners were released from Israeli prisons later, according to Qatar, a key mediator in the Israel-Hamas deal.
The agreement provides for the possibility of extending the truce in return for the release of a further 10 captives each day.
The Palestinian Prisoner’s Club said 15 women and 15 minors would be released.
Among them was 14-year-old Ahmad Saleimi.
“There is a lot of concern that this home could be raided at any moment,” said Al Jazeera’s Mohammed Jamjoom, reporting live from Saleimi’s home before his arrival.
The boy’s relatives, his friends and journalists had been huddling in the living room in Ras al-Amoud, a neighbourhood of East Jerusalem, in silence as Israeli security forces were outside.
Israeli authorities have warned the families of Palestinian women and children being released as part of the Gaza truce against celebrating their return home.
Qatar said that of the 10 Israelis released, there were nine women and one minor. It said one of those freed has Austrian citizenship, two have Argentinian citizenship, and one has Filipino citizenship.
About 240 captives were seized as Hamas launched an attack on southern Israel on October 7, killing approximately 1,200 people, according to Israeli officials. Dozens of hostages have since been released, the vast majority through the Israel-Hamas deal that is set to expire early on Thursday.
In addition to the exchanges, the deal includes a cessation of hostilities in Gaza and an increase in humanitarian aid to the territory which Israel had bombarded and besieged for more than seven weeks.
More than 15,000 people have been killed in the Israeli air and ground assault, including more than 6,000 children, according to Palestinian officials. Hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced amid dire humanitarian conditions.
“When I leave my home, I feel like a fish out of water.” A family in Gaza chose to return to live in the ruins of their house after it was destroyed in the Israeli bombardment of the besieged enclave.
Talks between US and Israeli spy agencies in Qatar, which is key mediator, include issue of captives held in Gaza.
The heads of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Israel’s Mossad have met in Qatar to discuss the extension of a truce between Israel and Hamas as well as the captives being held by the Palestinian group in Gaza.
CIA Director William Burns and David Barnea, head of the Mossad intelligence service, held talks with Qatar’s prime minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani, on Tuesday, a day after Doha announced a two-day extension of an original four-day humanitarian pause in Gaza that had been due to expire.
“We have to read a little bit between the lines here: [The intelligence chiefs were] important in the last meeting, which was on November 9. We believe that was one of the stepping stones getting us to the initial four-day deal,” Al Jazeera’s diplomatic editor James Bays said.
“The fact that we’ve got intelligence chiefs sitting here with the Qatari prime minister, who is also the foreign minister, is interesting because they’ve got the intelligence picture. But also I think it’s interesting partly because of who the US has got leading this effort,” he said, adding that Burns is “more experienced a negotiator than Antony Blinken”, the United States secretary of state.
Both Israel and Hamas have accused each other of violating the original truce. But they have continued to swap captives for prisoners. Hamas has released captives in its custody, with another 12 freed on Tuesday.
Our teams have successfully facilitated the release and transfer of 12 hostages held in Gaza.
We have been able to carry out this operation thanks to our neutral intermediary role.
Majed al-Ansari, a spokesperson for Qatar’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said in a post on X that 30 Palestinian prisoners are set to be released.
On Monday, mediator Qatar said a humanitarian pause in fighting between Israel and Hamas would be extended by two days, hours before the initial four-day truce in Gaza was set to expire.
Over the course of the initial pause, Hamas released 69 captives – 51 Israelis and 18 people from other nations.
In exchange, 150 Palestinian prisoners– 117 children and 33 women – held in Israeli prisons were released and more humanitarian aid allowed into Gaza.
The talks between the US and Israeli intelligence chiefs and Qatar were also attended by Egyptian officials.
“Is there a way that they can try and deal with the central problem here of keeping this [current truce] going while Israel at the same time wants to remove Hamas?” Bays asked.
“We don’t know anything from the information on the ground, but one possibility that some are suggesting is perhaps a deal could be done for the Hamas military leadership to be persuaded to go into exile in another country,” he said.
“That’s certainly not what we’re hearing from Israeli media sources; the latest we’re hearing from them is that the Israeli government does not want an extension beyond 10 days in total, taking us until the end of Sunday,” according to Bays.
Meanwhile, far-right Israeli Minister for National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir called on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to allow soldiers to return to fighting in Gaza to “crush Hamas” as he reacted to an army statement that three explosive devices were detonated in two locations near troops in northern Gaza.
“We must not wait until our fighters are killed. We must once again act in accordance with the goal of the war: the total destruction of Hamas,” the minister posted on X.
Hamas and Israel extended initial four-day truce by a further two days.
Israel and Hamas agreed to extend a four-day truce in Gaza by two more days, after Hamas pledged to free more Israeli captives in exchange for Israel releasing more Palestinian prisoners.
For the people of Gaza, it means more relief from bombardment and an increase in humanitarian supplies to Gaza.
So what happens next? What would both sides need to give up to bring about a longer peace?
Or is Israel simply going to return to war?
Presenter: Laura Kyle
Guests:
Mehran Kamrava – Professor of government at Georgetown University in Qatar
Gideon Levy – Columnist at Haaretz newspaper
Omar Rahman – Fellow at the Middle East Council on Global Affairs
Many of us did not dare go out on the first day of the temporary truce in Gaza. We were too afraid it would not hold. On the second day, we gathered our courage and stepped out.
The daylight illuminated the destruction caused by Israel’s non-stop bombardment of Gaza over the past seven weeks. We did not recognise our neighbourhoods and streets.
There are whole stretches of land where there is not a single building standing. Nothing has been spared: houses, residential towers, shops, bakeries, cafes, schools, universities, libraries, children’s centres, mosques, churches.
The destruction was the first thing we saw. Then came the pain.
Amid the panic, alarm and scurrying to survive the bombs, many of us did not fully grasp the loss of loved ones, the wounds sustained, the lives, bodies and dreams shattered and destroyed. Many could not bury their dead. Many could not grieve.
As Sabri Farra, a medical student from Gaza, wrote in a post on social media: “The word catastrophe is insufficient to describe this. It is a collective inferno of extermination against the Palestinian people.”
I left my home in Gaza City during the first week of the war. I was lucky to have made it. On the same day, the Israeli army bombed a convoy of evacuees, killing at least 70 people.
The road that Israel designated as a “safe route” for people to evacuate from the north to the south has been anything but safe. Throughout the past seven weeks, people who made it south reported seeing harrowing scenes of bodies of civilians lying everywhere. The horror was documented on videos circulated on social media.
When the truce came into effect, more Palestinians decided to evacuate from the north, hoping it would be safe to do so.
But as they made their way south, they encountered Israeli army checkpoints, where they were stopped and searched and their belongings confiscated. Women in my family and friends told me that Israeli soldiers even took their gold. They were forced to walk with their hands in the air, carrying nothing but their IDs.
Those who made it through were lucky, as Israeli soldiers have also been systematically abducting evacuees. I have friends with siblings who were taken and are still missing after trying to evacuate through the designated “safe route”. The Israelis arrested even Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha. He was let go only after a massive international campaign for his release. We still don’t know the true number of those who have been abducted.
The walk from the north to the south is almost eight hours if you don’t stop. This is a trip many Palestinians are struggling to make as they are too old, too young, too tired, too starved and dehydrated, injured or disabled.
While going north to south can be risky and could lead to abduction, going in the opposite direction can cost you your life. The Israeli army dropped leaflets on us warning us not to attempt that trip. Israeli soldiers killed at least two people trying to go back to the north on the first day of the truce.
I, like hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, am banned from returning to my home in Gaza City. I am heartbroken that I cannot go and check on my house to see if it is still standing. Many others who have family and friends shot in the streets or stuck under the rubble cannot go retrieve their bodies and give them a proper burial.
Israel controls everything: where we go, what we do, how much we eat or drink, whether we can save the wounded or those stuck under the rubble for days. It even decides how we tend to our dead. Its army is forcing more and more of us into an ever-shrinking space before it resumes the indiscriminate bombardment and the genocide.
The trucks of humanitarian aid Israel is allowing to enter Gaza cannot alleviate the humanitarian disaster. We are barely surviving. If the bombs don’t kill us, the hunger, the thirst, the lack of medicine, the cold will.
This pause has been more painful than the 50 days before it. It is the first time the people of Gaza were able to look at their open wounds, martyred children, slaughtered families, destroyed homes and shattered lives. Just imagine living for six days just to prepare and wait for your death on the seventh.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
Ramallah, occupied West Bank – Israel has persisted with arresting dozens of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem as it conducts a prisoner release with Hamas, the Gaza-based armed group.
In the first four days of the ongoing truce between Israel and Hamas, which began on Friday, Israel released 150 Palestinian prisoners – 117 children and 33 women.
Hamas released 69 captives – 51 Israelis and 18 people from other nations.
Over the same four days, Israel arrested at least 133 Palestinians from East Jerusalem and the West Bank, according to Palestinian prisoner associations.
“As long as there is occupation, the arrests will not stop. People must understand this because this is a central policy of occupation against Palestinians and to restrict any kind of resistance,” Amany Sarahneh, spokesperson for the Palestinian Prisoners Society, told Al Jazeera.
“This is a daily practice – its not just after October 7,” she added. “We actually expected more people to be arrested during these four days.”
The Qatar-mediated truce came after 51 days of relentless Israeli bombardment of the besieged Gaza Strip, which began on October 7, the day Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israeli territory, killing about 1,200 people.
Israel has killed more than 15,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip since then, the majority of them women and children.
On Monday, the original four-day truce was extended for another two days, during which an additional 60 Palestinians and 20 captives are expected to be released.
Under Israel’s 56-year military occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, Israeli forces carry out nightly raids into Palestinian homes, arresting 15 to 20 people on “calm” days.
In the first two weeks after October 7, Israel doubled the number of Palestinians in its custody from 5,200 people to more than 10,000. That number included 4,000 labourers from Gaza who worked in Israel and were detained before later being released back into Gaza.
Palestinian prisoner lawyers and monitoring groups have recorded 3,290 arrests in the West Bank and East Jerusalem since October 7. In mid-November, 35-year-old Eyad Banat was arrested while he was streaming live on TikTok. He was subsequently released.
‘No guarantees with the occupation’
Since the truce began, the streets of Ramallah have been flooded with people welcoming the freed prisoners.
But the worry for Palestinian prisoners does not end after their release. The majority of those freed are usually rearrested by Israeli forces in the days, weeks, months and years after their release.
Dozens of those who were arrested in a 2011 Israel-Hamas prisoner exchange were rearrested and had their sentences reinstated.
Sarahneh said it is not yet clear whether Israel has provided any guarantees that it will not rearrest those who have been released.
“There are no guarantees with the occupation. These people are liable to be rearrested at any point. The occupation always rearrests people who have been released,” she said.
“The biggest evidence that these people may be rearrested is that the majority of people being detained now are freed prisoners,” she added.
Since October 7, the conditions of Palestinians under arrest or in detention have severely declined. Many have complained of severe beatings while six Palestinian prisoners have died in Israeli custody.
Many of the women and children released during the truce have testified to the abuse they experienced in Israeli prisons.
Several videos have also emerged in recent weeks of Israeli soldiers beating, stepping on, abusing and humiliating detained Palestinians who have been blindfolded, cuffed and stripped either partially or entirely. Many social media users said the scenes brought back memories of the torture tactics used by United States forces in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison in 2003.
In addition to severe beatings, Israeli prison authorities halted medical attention for Palestinian prisoners for at least the first week after October 7, including for those who had been beaten, according to rights groups. Family visits as well as routine lawyer visits were stopped, the groups said.
Prisoners were previously entitled to three to four hours outside their cells in the yard, but that has now been cut to less than an hour, according to rights groups.
Overcrowded cells now often house double the number of detainees they were built for with many sleeping on the floor without mattresses, they said.
Israeli prison authorities have also cut electricity and hot water, conducted cell searches, removed all electrical devices including TVs, radios, cooking slabs and kettles, and shut down the canteen, which prisoners use to buy food and basic supplies such as toothpaste.
Shattered healthcare and sanitation systems must be restored in Gaza, says World Health Organization.
More people could die from disease than from bombings in the Gaza Strip if the health and sanitation systems are not repaired, the World Health Organization (WHO) has said.
Critical infrastructure in the besieged territory has been crippled by fuel and supply shortages and targeted attacks on hospitals and United Nations facilities since Israel launched strikes on Gaza on October 7.
“Eventually we will see more people dying from disease than from bombardment if we are not able to put back together this health system,” said Margaret Harris, a spokesperson for the WHO, speaking at a briefing in Geneva on Tuesday.
She described the collapse of al-Shifa Hospital in northern Gaza as a “tragedy” and voiced concern about the detention of some of its medical staff by Israeli forces who took over the complex earlier this month.
She also repeated concerns about a rise in outbreaks of infectious diseases in Gaza, particularly diarrhoeal diseases.
Citing a United Nations report on the living conditions of displaced residents in northern Gaza, she said: “[There are] no medicines, no vaccination activities, no access to safe water and hygiene and no food.”
Al-Shifa Hospital was left in ruins after an Israeli raid [File: Mohammed Hajjar/AP]
‘Risk of major outbreaks’
All key sanitation services have ceased operating in Gaza, which raises the prospect of an enormous surge of gastrointestinal and infectious diseases among the local populations – including cholera.
For Gaza’s 2.3 million residents, half of whom are children, finding drinkable water has become close to impossible.
The WHO has recorded more than 44,000 cases of diarrhoea and 70,000 acute respiratory infections, but real numbers may be significantly higher.
The UN health agency said it was extremely concerned that rains and floods during the approaching winter season will make an already dire situation even worse.
James Elder, a spokesperson from the UN children’s agency in Gaza, told reporters by video link that hospitals were full of children with war wounds and gastroenteritis from drinking dirty water. “They don’t have access to safe water and it’s crippling them,” he said.
If nothing changes, “there will be more and more people falling sick and the risk of major outbreaks will increase dramatically”, Richard Brennan, the regional emergency director for the Eastern Mediterranean region at WHO, told Al Jazeera earlier this month.
Truce is not enough
Despite the temporary truce agreement between Israel and Hamas, which was extended by two days just as it was set to expire on Tuesday morning, the Hamas-run Ministry of Health said no fuel had arrived for generators at hospitals in the territory’s north.
UN official Tor Wennesland warned the humanitarian situation “remains catastrophic”.
It “requires the urgent entry of additional aid and supplies in a smooth, predictable, and continuous manner to alleviate the unbearable suffering of Palestinians in Gaza,” the UN special coordinator for the Middle East peace process said.
Gaza City Mayor Yahya al-Siraj said that without fuel, the territory could not pump clean water or clear waste accumulating in the streets, warning of a potential public health “catastrophe”.
Clean-up was under way at al-Shifa, which is Gaza’s largest hospital. “We hope it can soon resume its activities,” said Gaza health ministry spokesman Mahmud Hammad.
Israeli bombardment has killed more than 14,800 Palestinians, including 6,150 children and more than 4,000 women, according to health authorities in the enclave.
The masked Qassam Brigades fighter adjusts his AK-47 assault rifle before he slides into a chair in the Gaza office of Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas.
“Hello, Condoleezza Rice. You have to deal with me now. There is no Abu Mazen [Abbas] any more,” the fighter jokes in an imaginary phone call to the then-United States secretary of state. Around him, fighters with the armed wing of Hamas snap photos of themselves.
The year is 2007, and Hamas has just fought and beaten a faction of Abbas’s Fatah party for control of Gaza.
Fatah lost the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections and was unhappy with the result, attacking the winners, Hamas.
This spelled not only a political fracturing but also a geographical one. The Palestinians split into the occupied West Bank, partially governed by the PA, and Gaza under Hamas.
Palestinians wave Hamas flags at a rally in Gaza on June 15, 2007, celebrating the takeover of all Fatah headquarters, including President Abbas’s office [Suhaib Salem/Reuters]
The situation had remained frozen since then – until now when Palestinians’ political future seems more uncertain than ever.
Israel’s stated objective for its current bombardment and ground offensive in the Gaza Strip in retaliation for Hamas’s surprise attacks on October 7 in southern Israel has been to take out the armed group.
If Israel is successful, the return of the PA to the beleaguered enclave is being touted as a possibility. But will it return? And can it?
Gaza under Hamas
Under Hamas, the Gaza Strip has been besieged, impoverished by Israel and assaulted on five occasions in the past 17 years.
In this latest assault, the Palestinian political future looks very precarious.
Israel said it aims to destroy Hamas entirely and that is why it launched an all-out assault on the Gaza Strip on October 7.
Israeli raids, settler violence and settlement expansions in the occupied West Bank are among the reasons Hamas launched its attacks on October 7, Izzat al-Rasheq, a member of Hamas’s Political Bureau, said.
“We warned the Israelis and the international community that this relentless pressure will result in an explosion, but they did not listen,” al-Rasheq told Al Jazeera, adding that incursions on Al-Aqsa Mosque, thousands of unjustly detained Palestinians, and the blockade on Gaza all played a role as well.
In a scenario in which Israel succeeds in eliminating Hamas somehow, it has been suggested by the US that the PA take over the beleaguered enclave.
So far, Israel does not agree, but what do the Palestinians think of the PA? Can it return to Gaza? And can Hamas be destroyed?
Collusion vs confrontation
The crux of the divide between the two most dominant players in Palestinian politics is their differing approaches to the Palestinian cause.
While Fatah and the PA, whose current leadership is one and the same, focus on cooperation with Israel, Hamas’s strategy is to confront Israel militarily, said Aboud Hamayel, a lecturer at Birzeit University in the West Bank.
“There’s nothing we can do,” Hamayel said, mimicking what he said is the PA’s defeatist tone.
The PA’s support base in the West Bank is based on a transactional relationship with Israel, the analyst said. However, some Fatah factions do take part in the armed struggle in the West Bank, where the movement is more vocal and diverse than the PA, he added.
Fatah still exists in Gaza, where it is now in the opposition. Its supporters there are split between loyalty to Abbas and former Fatah leader Mohammed Dahlan, who has been in exile in the United Arab Emirates for 10 years, Hamayel said.
The PA has international recognition and receives funding and tax revenues. In turn, it manages security in its territory, theoretically freeing Israel from dealing with day-to-day Palestinian life, Hamayel said, except when Israel conducts raids and arrests resisting Palestinians.
Police officers stand guard as Palestinian lawyers protest against the PA’s rule by decree and demand a return to normal parliamentary lawmaking in Ramallah in the occupied West Bank [File: Mohamad Torokman/Reuters]
The post-war question
Fatah does want to achieve unity with Hamas, according to the group’s spokesperson, even though several attempts over the years to do that have failed.
“Through national dialogue, we will reach a consensus on how to govern ourselves, how to lead our cause and present it to the world,” Jamal Nazzal, a Fatah spokesperson and a member of its parliamentary body, the Revolutionary Council, told Al Jazeera.
A unified Palestinian entity is the stated US goal, especially as discussions arise on the fate of Gaza after the war, according to Kenneth Katzman, a senior fellow at the New York-based Soufan Center.
This entity would control both Gaza and the West Bank, accept Israel’s existence and resume Oslo negotiations with Israel, he said, referring to agreements between Israel and the umbrella Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in the 1990s.
“I think the intent is to get back to where the talks left off,” Katzman told Al Jazeera, adding that they would be the precursor to Washington mediating a two-state solution.
Rafe Jabari, a French-Palestinian political science analyst, agreed that a two-state solution should be pursued after the war’s end but said a new agreement should be drawn up to replace the Oslo Accords because Palestinians were coerced to make too many concessions in that process.
Israel will be unwilling to relinquish control of the lands it occupies, he added, and it will not be able to take out Hamas as it says it wants to. “Hamas is a part of Palestinian society. They can’t eliminate Hamas,” he told Al Jazeera, adding that they’re not just a political wing.
Hamas agrees. “They cannot rearrange the Palestinian house to suit themselves. Hamas will remain, and what comes after Hamas will also be Hamas,” said al-Rasheq, adding that Palestinians would not accept “the US or Israel or anyone else” telling them who should govern them.
“The Palestinian people will never accept an entity that enters Gaza on an Israeli tank,” he said.
Because it is impossible to eradicate Hamas, Jabari said, the group will have to be involved in any post-war negotiations.
“All actors should be involved in the resolution of the conflict,” he said, citing past negotiations in which that occurred even when one party was viewed as a “terrorist group”, such as during the French-Algeria peace agreement in 1962 or, more recently, in talks between the US and the Taliban.
A transition period involving an international peacekeeping force in Gaza was mentioned by both Katzman and Jabari as a possible first step before negotiations.
But, Jabari added, these forces have been abject failures in recent conflicts.
The PA’s waning popularity
The PA’s government in the West Bank is seen by many Palestinians as collusion with Israel.
Much of the frustration is with Abbas, who is seen as weak for not managing to advance any peace processes in his nearly two decades in power, Jabari said. He is also seen as not having advocated enough against Israel’s practices from settlement expansions to harassment of Palestinians, he added.
PA security practices in the occupied West Bank have also been criticised as heavy-handed but, Nazzal said, the PA needs to “restore order and protect the law”.
“Movements of the Palestinian security forces or officials or normal individuals sometimes require security coordination with the occupying power,” he said, adding that everything the PA administers in the occupied West Bank “has to be coordinated with Israel”.
Nazzal distanced Fatah from the PA, however, saying it is “a liberation movement that doesn’t have any sort of contact with Israel”.
Despite frustration with the PA, Katzman said Palestinians who are bearing the brunt of the Israeli aggression may be more disgruntled with Hamas’s actions.
“Much of the Gaza population now realises that Hamas is going to keep dragging them into a war with Israel, and they don’t want that,” he said. “So I think they’re willing to overlook the Palestinian Authority’s faults. I think that’s true for Palestinians in the West Bank as well. They don’t want … forever war with Israel.”
However, al-Reshaq said: “Palestinians everywhere support Hamas more. They see Hamas is working to resist the occupation,” he said, adding that global support for Palestinians has surged in the past few weeks.
‘The beginning of the end’?
With mixed support for the PA among Palestinians, what is the likelihood of it returning to govern Gaza?
Nazzal pointed out that, despite Hamas rule, the PA already runs certain elements of life in Gaza, such as the health and education ministries and the banking system.
Meanwhile, the Fatah movement, he added, is opposed to a future in which Hamas is taken out.“We do not agree on the Israeli military objectives in Gaza, nor can we predict what will be the outcome of this terrible assault that Israel has launched against our people,” Nazzal said.
What Fatah knows, however, is that Palestinians should decide who governs them through legislative elections that secure a path for the two-state solution, he added.
“The only thing that nobody has tried is for the Palestinians to live freely in an independent state of their own,” Nazzal said. “Until that happens, we will keep going from one cycle of violence to the next.”
The US is still ramping up its push for the return of the PA in Gaza, though, and the reasons President Joe Biden’s administration has for this strategy is multifold, Hamayel said.
First is to buy time for Israel to finish its military operations by distracting the international community, he said.
It wants to allow its ally to retaliate for Hamas’s October 7 attacks while coaxing it to think about what’s next, the analyst said.
The White House also wants to keep its regional allies on side, especially as Arab states struggle with their citizens not feeling that they are doing enough to end the Israeli assault, according to Hamayel.
However, he concluded, the PA takeover would happen only if Hamas loses, an outcome still too early to predict.
Fatah and Hamas officials in talks in Moscow, Russia, on February 12, 2019 [File: Pavel Golovkin/Pool via Reuters]
Hamas, meanwhile, sees weakness in Israel’s seemingly directionless attack on civilians.
“The size of the defeat [on October 7] made [Israel] lose its mind and strike out in any direction with no thought,” al-Reshaq said. “It has failed. It failed on the battlefield on October 7 when faced with the Qassam Brigades, and it is failing now because it is unable to achieve any real goals in Gaza.”
In the event that Israel cannot take Hamas out, the fissure between the two Palestinian political groups will deepen, Hamayel predicted.
Hamas would remain standing, a valiant hero for Palestinians for fighting Israel, and the PA would appear weak, shamed for cooperating with Israel over the years, he said.
That would kick off a vicious cycle of a seemingly weak PA inspiring more settler activity in the West Bank, which would erode the group’s control of the territory more and more, he said.
“This could be the beginning of the end of the PA,” Hamayel said.
A truce in the Israel-Hamas war appeared to be extending into a fifth day as the two sides completed their fourth release of captives from Gaza in exchange for Palestinians held in Israeli jails under an original four-day truce deal while mediators said the process would continue.
Qatar, which along with Egypt has facilitated indirect talks between Israel and Hamas, said that there was an agreement to extend by two days the original four-day truce that was to expire on Monday.
“We have an extension … two more days,” Qatar’s Ambassador to the United Nations Alya Ahmed Saif Al-Thani told reporters after a closed-door UN Security Council meeting on Monday, saying both sides were to release more people.
“This is a very positive step,” Al-Thani said.
While the Israeli government had yet to officially confirm the truce extension by early on Tuesday morning, Israel’s Army Radio, citing the prime minister’s office, reported that a new list of captives – who are expected to be released later in the day – had been received.
Israel has said it would extend the ceasefire by one day for every 10 additional captives released by Hamas.
Local news website Axios reported the latest list contained the names of 10 Israeli captives. There was no immediate comment from the Israeli prime minister’s office.
Israel on Monday said 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 under the truce.
The Israel Prison Service said 33 Palestinian prisoners were also released on Monday from Israel’s Ofer prison in the West Bank and from a detention centre in Jerusalem, bringing the total number of Palestinians it has freed since Friday to 150.
The freed Palestinian prisoners were greeted by loud cheers as the Red Cross bus they were travelling in made its way through the streets of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank.
The original truce agreement also allowed more aid trucks into Gaza, where the civilian population faces shortages of food, fuel, drinking water and medicine.
While describing the extension of the truce as “a glimpse of hope and humanity”, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said two more days was not enough time to meet Gaza’s aid needs.
The UN 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 throughout Gaza where 1.8 million people are internally displaced.
Palestinians walk among the rubble of houses destroyed in Israeli strikes in the Khan Younis refugee camp in the southern Gaza Strip on November 27, 2023 [Mohammed Salem/Reuters]
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 Hamas’s October 7 raid on southern Israel, which killed about 1,200 people.
Israel’s intense bombing of the densely populated Gaza Strip has also resulted in 46,000 homes destroyed and more than 234,000 damaged –about 60 percent of the entire housing stock in Gaza, the UN said in the report.
Despite the apparent extension of the truce for two additional days, Israel remains committed to crushing Hamas militarily and has warned that its war on Gaza will resume.
Resumption will likely see Israeli forces expand their air, land and sea offensive from the devastated northern Gaza to the south of the enclave where hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have fled seeking refuge.
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