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Even before the ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas was fully in place, Palestinians in the war-battered Gaza Strip began to return to the remains of the homes they had evacuated during the 15-month war.
Many were returning to homes in ruins.
Displaced Palestinians, taking refuge in southern parts, start to return their homes after the announcement of ceasefire and hostage-prisoner swap deal between Hamas and Israel in Gaza City, Gaza on January 19, 2025. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images
They trekked through the wreckage, some on foot and others hauling their belongings on donkey carts.
The return of the families comes amid looming uncertainty about whether the ceasefire deal will bring more than a temporary halt to the fighting, who will govern the enclave and how it will be rebuilt.
Building lie in ruin as Palestinians carry their belongings following Israeli strikes on residential buildings at the Qatari-funded Hamad City, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip 2 December, 2023. Photograph: Ahmed Zakot/Reuters
Internally displaced Palestinians in Rafah town, in the southern Gaza Strip, on 19 January.
Internally displaced Palestinians in Rafah town, in the southern Gaza Strip, 19 January 2025. Photograph: Mohammed Saber/EPA
Minutes after the truce began, the United Nations said the first trucks carrying desperately needed humanitarian aid had entered the Palestinian territory.
“It is imperative that this ceasefire removes the significant security and political obstacles to delivering aid,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said.
The World Health Organisation said it was also ready to pour aid into Gaza but that it would need “systematic access” across the territory to do so.
WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus later said on X that “restoring the health system in Gaza will be a complex and challenging task, given the scale of destruction”.
Palestinian medics inspect the damage of Al Najjar hospital that was destroyed by Israeli airstrikes on Rafah, as a ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas went into effect, Gaza Strip, Sunday, 19 January, 2025. Photograph: Jehad Alshrafi/AP
Another UN agency, the World Food Programme, said it was moving full throttle to get food to as many Gazans as possible.
“We’re trying to reach a million people within the shortest possible time,” the WFP’s deputy executive director, Carl Skau, told AFP.
Will the Israel-Hamas agreement hold?
What happens after the deal’s first phase of 42 days is uncertain. The agreement’s subsequent stages call for more releases of hostages and prisoners and a permanent end to the war.
The next release of hostages and prisoners is due next Saturday. In just over two weeks, talks are to begin on the far more challenging second phase of the ceasefire agreement.
Already, the hours-long delay in implementing the Gaza ceasefire agreement “is not a good omen for a deal that many fear could be doomed to failure” as it moves through its challenging three phases, writes the Guardian’s Peter Beaumont.
“Trust on both sides has been negligible at best,” he wrote.
For more details on the precarious ceasefire deal, read this analysis on the dynamics at play.
If you are just getting up to speed on the latest of the ceasefire deal, our reporters on the ground have filed these dispatches of the events.
In the West Bank thousands of people waited for hours into the evening and early morning, waving the flags of Palestine and Hamas, as they waited to embrace their loved ones.
People react as a bus carrying released Palestinian prisoners from the Ofer Israeli military prison arrives in Ramallah, early 20 January 2025, amid a ceasefire and hostage release deal between Israel and Hamas. Israel and Hamas agreed on a hostage release deal and a Gaza ceasefire to be implemented on 19 January 2025. Photograph: Alaa Badarneh/EPA
“I’m happy, but not too happy,” Nawaf Jarabaa, told the Guardian, “My daughter was arrested simply for expressing her ideas … The thing that bothers me the most is that people think that the Israelis have only behaved this way towards us since 7 October, but the truth is that it has always been like this.’’
Read the full report here.
Three women held captive for 471 days by Hamas were released as part of a ceasefire between Israel and the Palestinian militant group.
This image grab from a handout video released by the Hamas Media Office shows Israeli hostages (L to R) Emily Damari, Romi Gonen, and Doron Steinbracher, who were abducted by Palestinian militants during the 7 October, 2023 attacks, sitting in a Hamas vehicle before being handed over to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in the Gaza Strip on 19 January, 2025 after a ceasefire and hostage-prisoner exchange deal in the war between Israel and Hamas was implemented. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images
Romi Gonen, 24
Romi Gonen was kidnapped from the Nova music festival in southern Israel on 7 October, 2023. That morning, Gonen’s mother, Merav, and her eldest daughter spent nearly five hours speaking to Gonen as militants marauded through the festival grounds. Gonen told her family that roads clogged with abandoned cars made escape impossible and that she would seek shelter in some bushes before she was taken hostage and held by Hamas for 15 months.
Her mother Merav Gonen has been one of the most outspoken voices advocating for the return of the hostages, appearing nearly daily on Israeli news programs and traveling abroad on missions.
Emily Damari, 28
Emily Damari is a British-Israeli citizen kidnapped from her apartment on Kibbutz Kfar Aza, a communal farming village hit hard by Hamas’ assault. She lived in a small apartment in a neighbourhood for young adults, the closest part of the kibbutz to Gaza. Militants broke through the border fence of the kibbutz and ransacked the neighborhood.
On Sunday, her mother Mandy released a statement of thanks for supporters “who never stopped saying her name.”
Doron Steinbrecher, 31
Doron Steinbrecher is a veterinary nurse who loves animals, and a neighbour to Damari in Kibbutz Kfar Aza. Steinbrecher holds both Israeli and Romanian citizenship.
On the morning of 7 October, 2023, Steinbrecher called her mother, according to a report by the Associated Press. “Mom, I’m scared. I’m hiding under the bed and I hear them trying to enter my apartment,” her brother, Dor, recalled. She was able to send a voice message to her friends. “They’ve got me! They’ve got me! They’ve got me!” in the moments of her abduction.
Steinbrecher was featured in a video released by Hamas on 26 January, 2024, along with two female Israeli soldiers. Her brother said the video gave them hope that she was alive but sparked concern because she looked tired, weak, and gaunt.
Details are starting to emerge about the identities of the freed Palestinians.
Here is what we know so far.
The first batch of those freed included 69 women and 21 teenage boys, from the West Bank and Jerusalem, according to Hamas.
- Among those released was prominent detainee Khalida Jarrar, 62.
Palestinian leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), Khalida Jarrar (C) greeted by relatives as she arrives in Ramallah, early 20 January 2025, from the Israeli military prison of Ofer, in the West Bank city of Ramallah, ahead of the release of Palestinian prisoners in the Israel-Hamas release deal, amid a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. Photograph: Alaa Badarneh/EPA
Jarrar is a leading member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a secular leftist faction that was involved in attacks against Israel in the 1970s but later scaled back militant activities. Since her arrest in late 2023, she was held under indefinitely renewable administrative detention, a widely criticised practice that Israel uses against Palestinians.
“There’s this double feeling we’re living in, on the one hand, this feeling of freedom, that we thank everyone for, and on the other hand, this pain, of losing so many Palestinian martyrs,” she told The Associated Press.
Other detainees released include:
- Bushra al-Tawil, a Palestinian journalist jailed in Israel in March 2024. “The wait was extremely hard. But thank God, we were certain that at any moment we would be released,” she told Agence France-Presse.
- Shatha Jarabaa, 24, who was arrested over a social media post criticising the “brutality” of Israel’s campaign in Gaza. “I’m very happy! Thank God I’m outside. They treated me very bad in prison. It was horrible,” she told the Guardian.
- Ahmad Khsha, 18, who was arrested in January 2024 in Jenin. “They arrested me because my brother died during a shootout in Jenin. After he died, they arrested me. They raided our cells on Saturday before releasing us and threw teargas at us. They tortured us in the cell, every day. They also tortured and mistreated the women.”
- Qassem Jaafra, 17, who was given a haircut on his return home.
Seventeen-year-old Palestinian prisoner Qassem Jaafra (C) gets a haircut upon his arrival home in the Silwan neighbourhood in east Jerusalem, following his release in the early hours of 20 January, 2025 along with 90 other Palestinian prisoners from an Israeli jail. The Israel Prison Service said it had completed the release of 90 Palestinian prisoners early on January 20, as part of a Gaza ceasefire deal that took effect a day earlier and saw the released of three Israeli female hostages who were held by Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Photograph: Ahmad Gharabli/AFP/Getty Images
Hello and welcome to our live coverage of major developments in the Israel-Gaza war after a long-awaited ceasefire in Gaza came into effect on Sunday.
In the hours since, hostage and prisoner exchanges have been carried out on both sides.
Here is a recap of the latest.
- Ninety Palestinian prisoners were released early on Monday as part of the ceasefire deal. Those freed from Israeli prisons included 69 women and 21 teenage boys from the West Bank and Jerusalem, according to Hamas. The prisoners, most of whom were freed from Ofer prison in Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, were welcomed by thousands of people celebrating.
- It followed the release of three Israeli women held hostage by Hamas in tunnels beneath Gaza, ending a protracted ordeal that began with their violent abduction by Hamas on 7 October 2023. Among those released was joint British national Emily Damari, 28, who was freed alongside Romi Gonen, 24 and Doron Steinbrecher, 31. The women have been reunited with their mothers after being handed over by International Committee for the Red Cross.
- The three are in a “stable condition” and will be monitored for a few days, according to a news conference at Sheba Medical Center in Tel Aviv. A member of the hospital staff, Professor Itai Pessach, said: “I’m happy to report that they are in stable condition. That allows us and them to focus on what is the most important thing for now – reuniting with the families.”
- As the fighting ceased, hundreds of aid trucks queued to enter Gaza to deliver supplies to its 2.3 million residents, 90% of whom have been displaced by the conflict, many multiple times.
- The World Health Organization says it is ready to pour much-needed aid into Gaza during the Israel-Hamas truce, but that it would need “systematic access” across the territory to do so. Much of the Gaza Strip’s health infrastructure has been destroyed by the more than year-long war.
- The first phase of the truce took effect after a three-hour delay during which Israeli warplanes and artillery pounded the Gaza Strip. The last-minute blitz killed 13 people, Palestinian health authorities said. Israel claimed it had struck terrorists although Al Jazeera reported that at least two missiles hit a family travelling on a donkey cart as they tried to return home.
- Thousands of displaced Palestinians have started to return home, many to destroyed buildings and homes in ruins. There is no detailed plan in place to govern Gaza after the war, much less rebuild it. Nine in 10 homes have been destroyed as well as schools, hospitals, shops, mosques and cemeteries.
- Under the first phase of the ceasefire deal, which is to last 42 days, the militant group has agreed to release 33 hostages including children, women (including female soldiers) and men aged over 50, in exchange for hundreds of Palestinians held in Israeli jails.
- In the second phase, the remaining living hostages are due to be sent back and a corresponding ratio of Palestinian prisoners will be freed, and Israel will completely withdraw from the territory. The specifics are subject to further negotiations, which are due to start 16 days into the first phase.
- The third phase will address the exchange of bodies of deceased hostages and Hamas members, and a reconstruction plan for Gaza will be launched. Arrangements for future governance of the strip remain hazy.
