In the early hours of Wednesday, the Israeli government and Hamas officials agreed to a four-day truce, the first of its kind since the war began on 7 October.
The deal includes the release of 50 of over 200 hostages held by Hamas since the 7 October attack. Four hostages were released earlier, in late October.
Hamas said the deal depended on the release of 150 Palestinian political prisoners from Israeli captivity. This is not a side issue: Hamas’s pretext for seizing the hostages was to secure the release of Palestinian prisoners.
Currently 5,000 Palestinians are in Israeli prisons, approximately 1,100 of whom are detained without charge or trial, with Israel detaining approximately one million Palestinians in the occupied territory since 1967, according to UN data dated July 2023.
Earlier this year, the UN Special Rapporteur on the the situation of human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories Francesca Albanese said, “Israel’s unlawful carceral practices in the occupied Palestinian territory have turned it into an open-air prison.”
Israel has suggested it will extend the pause in fighting for another day for every 10 captives released by Hamas.
According to Reuters, a secret team of advisors, or “cell” was formed, at the bequest of Qatar, shortly after the 7 October attack, to work with US President Joe Biden, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and CIA Director Bill Burns, among others, towards negotiating a deal for hostage release.
However, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has made it very clear that the bombardment of Gaza will continue after the hostages are released.
“Outside there has been a lot of nonsense talk,” he said. “As if after we ceasefire for the release of the hostages, we will stop the war.
“I would like to clarify, we are at war, and we will continue to fight, until we reach all our goals.”
Three leading Palestinian Human Rights organisations lodged an application with the International Criminal Court (ICC) in November for arrest warrants against Israeli leaders for genocide and incitement to genocide.
“The continuous barrage of Israeli airstrikes on densely populated civilian areas within the Gaza Strip, the suffocating siege imposed on this territory, the forced displacement of its population, the use of toxic gas, and the denial of necessities, such as food, water, fuel and electricity […] amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity,” the applicants said.
On 7 October Hamas killed an estimated 1,400 Israelis, mostly civilians, in a “surprise attack”, described by experts from the Center for Strategic and International Studies as a “dramatic change in tactics and strategy” which reignited the decades-long conflict that has “already killed so many people” in the occupied Palestinian territories.
Since the 7 October Hamas attack, Israel’s subsequent offensive has killed more than 13,000 civilians in the Gaza enclave, of which over 5,500 were children, and displaced 1.7 million of the 2.3 million population. However, Palestinian health officials in Gaza say they have lost the ability to count the dead due to the intensity of the bombardments and loss of infrastructure.
