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A truck carrying humanitarian aid enters the Gaza Strip via the Rafah crossing with Egypt, hours after the start of a four-day truce in battles between Israel and Palestinian Hamas militants, on Friday.
Said Khatib/AFP via Getty Images
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Said Khatib/AFP via Getty Images
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A truck carrying humanitarian aid enters the Gaza Strip via the Rafah crossing with Egypt, hours after the start of a four-day truce in battles between Israel and Palestinian Hamas militants, on Friday.
Said Khatib/AFP via Getty Images
TEL AVIV, Israel — A four-day cease-fire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza went into effect early Friday. The temporary truce sets the stage for the first exchange of Israeli hostages for Palestinian prisoners in the nearly seven-week conflict.
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The agreement officially went into effect at 7 a.m. local time. It comes after weeks of Israeli bombardment of Gaza that has killed more than 12,000 Palestinians.
Under the deal brokered by Qatar, Egypt and the United States, later Friday Hamas will release some of the 240 hostages seized in their deadly Oct. 7 attack on Israel that killed about 1,200 people. In return, Israel will free some of the Palestinian prisoners it holds.
Fighting continued in the lead-up to the cease-fire
With the anticipated pause in the fighting, crowds of Palestinians were seen pouring into the streets in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis. Some Palestinians in southern Gaza tried to return to their homes for the first time since the start of the conflict.
“There are no results from this pause, a pause where people can’t return to their homes and injuries among people trying to go home,” Mohammed El Azzazi, a pharmacist from Rafah, told NPR.
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Children walk amid the rubble of a school hit during an Israeli strike before the start of a four-day truce in the battles between Israel and Hamas militants, in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on Friday.
Mohammed Abed/AFP via Getty Images
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Children walk amid the rubble of a school hit during an Israeli strike before the start of a four-day truce in the battles between Israel and Hamas militants, in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on Friday.
Mohammed Abed/AFP via Getty Images
Meanwhile, at the Qalandiya refugee camp in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Raed Hhadeh, who teaches physics at a school in Ramallah, expressed mixed feelings about the cease-fire. “I feel good for the people to have rest from the bombardment, but this is not the solution,” he told NPR. “The massacre has to be stopped — not give the people four days of rest. It’s a massacre. They are slaughtering children and this has to be stopped.”
He said that Gazans returning to their homes in the east, People are “won’t find anything left.”
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People sit at tables at the street dining and drinking at the bar Shpagat where a large “bring them home now” banner is displayed on November 23, 2023 in Tel Aviv, Israel. The first batch of hostages are slated for release by Hamas on Friday. Israel is also expected to release Palestinian prisoners.
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People sit at tables at the street dining and drinking at the bar Shpagat where a large “bring them home now” banner is displayed on November 23, 2023 in Tel Aviv, Israel. The first batch of hostages are slated for release by Hamas on Friday. Israel is also expected to release Palestinian prisoners.
Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty Images
The hostages-for-prisoners exchange is expected to occur in batches over the four days of the truce. Israel, which says it notified the families of the hostages expected for release on Friday, has not made a list public.
At a news conference Friday morning, Israeli government spokesman Ziv Agmon said representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross are expected to take hostages across the border and hand them over to Israeli representatives, who will then confirm their identities. However, the exact location for the exchange has not been made clear.
The released hostages will be flown to five hospitals across the country, Agmon said, adding that adult abductees will be debriefed by Israeli security forces.
Israel has not said exactly how many hostages will be freed or how many Palestinians it will release. Hamas says it is prepared to free 13 hostages on Friday in exchange for around 39 Palestinians. Reportedly some 50 Israeli hostages may be released in exchange for 150 Palestinians over the course of the truce.
A senior Biden administration official said earlier this week that there are 10 dual U.S.-Israeli citizens unaccounted, three of whom could be released as part of the deal. Among those that could be released is a young girl whose parents were killed in the initial Hamas attack. The girl turns 4 on Friday.
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Following last month’s Hamas attacks, Israel vowed to destroy the militant group and responded with heavy air and ground strikes on Gaza. Israel now controls a large portion of Gaza’s north.
In the hours leading up to the truce, Israel’s military “intensified strikes” with intense ground battles against Hamas, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). A particular concern for the U.N. is the Indonesian Hospital in northern Gaza where about 200 patients and medical staff are still trying to evacuate. The U.N. says Israeli tanks surrounded the hospital and Gaza’s Ministry of Health reported the hospital was struck again by Israeli fire.
In a statement, the Israel Defense Forces says it “has completed … operational preparations according to the combat lines of the pause,” adding that it had destroyed a tunnel complex it identified earlier this week under the Al-Shifa hospital in northern Gaza.
“Over the last day and night, IDF troops on the ground, in the air, and at sea continued to strike terror targets, operate in different areas to locate suspicious structures and engage with terrorists,” the military’s statement said. “In addition, the forces struck a terror tunnel route, which was identified over the past few days.”
About a half-hour before the cease-fire kicked in, an Israeli military spokesman released an Arabic-language video on social media addressed “to the population of sector Gaza.”
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Trucks carrying humanitarian aid enter the Gaza Strip via the Rafah crossing with Egypt on Frida, hours after the start of a four-day truce in battles between Israel and Palestinian Hamas militants.
Said Khatib/AFP via Getty Images
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Said Khatib/AFP via Getty Images
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Trucks carrying humanitarian aid enter the Gaza Strip via the Rafah crossing with Egypt on Frida, hours after the start of a four-day truce in battles between Israel and Palestinian Hamas militants.
Said Khatib/AFP via Getty Images
“The cease-fire for humanitarian purposes is temporary,” the spokesman said, insisting that northern Gaza, where the fighting has been concentrated, “is a dangerous war zone and it is forbidden to move around.”
“For your safety, you must remain in the humanitarian zone in the south of the (Gaza) Strip,” he said.
Humanitarian aid begins to trickle into Gaza
Large areas of Gaza have been devastated by Israeli air strikes and tanks since the conflict began, leaving much of the territory’s 2.3 million people without electricity, food and clean water. According to UNRWA, the U.N. relief agency overseeing Palestinians, more than a million Gazans have been internally displaced as a result of the conflict.
According to Egypt’s state information service, 130,000 liters (about 34,000 gallons) of diesel and four trucks of gas from Egypt will enter the Gaza Strip on the first day. “Humanitarian aid will begin to flow from Egypt to the Gaza Strip as soon as the truce agreement enters into force, where 200 trucks, loaded with food, medicine and water, will be entered daily for the first time since the start of the Israeli war on the Strip about fifty days ago,” it said.
Israel confirmed Friday that four tanker trucks each of fuel and cooking gas had been transferred from Egypt to U.N. humanitarian aid organizations at the Rafah crossing in southern Gaza.
“This was approved by the government of Israel as part of the pause and the framework for the release of the hostages agreed with the United States and mediated by Qatar and Egypt,” Israel’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) office said in a statement. “The fuel and cooking gas are designated for operating essential humanitarian infrastructure in the Gaza Strip.”
In a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, UNRWA said: “No matter how much they provide — it is difficult to meet demands of the whole” Gaza Strip, adding that “over-crowding and unsanitary conditions” were leading to the spread of disease.
NPR’s Scott Neuman and Daniel Estrin reported from Tel Aviv and Brian Mann contributed from Ramallah in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.