The mediating country Qatar on Saturday announced a time for the cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hamas to take effect the next day, setting off final preparations for a truce that much of the world hopes will end 15 months of destruction in Gaza.
The deal should go into effect at 8:30 a.m. local time on Sunday, said Majed al-Ansari, a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry of Qatar, which spent months alongside the United States and Egypt struggling to broker an agreement.
Israel’s government approved the deal early Saturday morning after hours of deliberations and amid internal rifts in the governing coalition of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The approval cleared a final obstacle, raising hopes for Israelis who want to see loved ones returned and Gazans who have survived one of the most intense bombing campaigns of the 21st century.
“It’s a mix of joy, sadness and longing for a new beginning,” said Mariam Moeen Awwad, 23, who has been displaced from her home in northern Gaza six times since the war began.
Ms. Awad had planned to move into her newly furnished apartment with her husband in November 2023. The war derailed those plans, leaving the couple in an overcrowded property and eager to return home, she said, “if it’s even still there.”
In Israel, the authorities have started preparations to welcome home dozens of hostages, without knowing whether they will return malnourished, traumatized or dead.
In his first remarks since the cease-fire’s approval, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in an address on Saturday night that 33 hostages would be released in the first phase of the deal, “most of them alive.”
Defending the deal, he argued also listed that Israel had made major strategic gains over the past several months, including the killing of top Hamas leaders. “As I pledged to you — we have changed the face of the Middle East,” he said.
Three reception points have been established to receive the hostages along the Gaza border, according to an Israeli military official. Those will be staffed by Israeli soldiers, as well as doctors and psychologists, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity in accordance with protocol.
The hostage release is expected to be the first such major exchange since a weeklong cease-fire early in the war.
“The ones who were freed back then were already poorly nourished,” Hagar Mizrahi, a senior Israeli health ministry official, said of the hostages freed during the 2023 truce. “Imagine their situation now, after an additional 400 days. We are extremely worried about this.”
Of the women, older men and other hostages set to be returned, many are believed to have been held in Hamas’s network of tunnels in Gaza, under conditions likely to leave physical and psychological scars. Israeli hospitals are preparing isolated areas where the hostages can begin recuperating in privacy.
“Last time, we saw the Red Cross transferring the hostages, and some of them were running to the relatives, hugging them,” said Einat Yehene, a clinical psychologist working with the Hostage Families Forum, an advocacy group. “It’s not going to be easy and similar this time, given the physical and the emotional conditions we expect.”
In exchange, hundreds of Palestinian prisoners are to be freed. The total number of prisoners to be released and their identities were among the many contentious points involved in the negotiations for a deal.
The new deal also calls for allowing 600 trucks carrying aid to enter Gaza daily and negotiations on the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the territory and a permanent end to the war.
Those negotiations are likely to be bitter and difficult, like the months of talks that yielded this week’s cease-fire agreement. Mr. Netanyahu is already facing an internal revolt within his governing coalition, which his far-right partners have threatened to quit over their opposition to the deal.
They have called for the war to continue to eradicate Hamas, which led the October 2023 attack on Israel that killed about 1,200 people, took another 250 hostage and started the war.
Mr. Netanyahu also faces pressure from the many Israelis who want all the hostages returned, and from the outgoing U.S. president, Joseph R. Biden Jr., and the president-elect, Donald J. Trump, who both want the war ended.
In his address, Mr. Netanyahu said the agreement preserves Israel’s right to return to the war against Hamas if it so chooses. The agreement also allows Israeli forces to remain in a buffer zone along Israel’s border with Gaza and Gaza’s border with Egypt, he added, at least during the initial phase.
“If we need to go back to fighting, we will do it in new ways and with great might,” he said.
Another uncertainty in how the deal might unfold arises from the chaotic, ruined conditions within Gaza, where tens of thousands of people have been killed since the war began and hundreds of thousands of others live without homes, clean water or ready supplies of food or medicine.
Israel’s campaign has left a power vacuum across much of Gaza, and lawlessness has proved a dangerous factor in efforts to get aid to people in need. Organized looting has repeatedly stripped trucks of supplies, including from a convoy of 100 trucks holding U.N. aid late last year.
Israel has continued striking Gaza since the cease-fire was announced, and over the past 24 hours, 23 Palestinians were killed and 83 others wounded, Gaza’s health ministry said on Saturday morning. More than 46,000 people have been killed in Gaza since the war began, according to the ministry, which does not distinguish between combatants and civilians.
Desperately needed aid is expected to pour into Gaza once the cease-fire begins. Egypt, which shares a border with the enclave, was intensifying preparations on Friday to deliver assistance including food and tents, according to Al Qahera News, an Egyptian state broadcaster.
