Hamas hands over bodies of four Israeli hostages as first phase of ceasefire nears end
The handover was confirmed by an Israeli security official early on Thursday on condition of anonymity, with a formal announcement yet to be made.
Meanwhile, a Red Cross convoy carrying dozens of released Palestinian prisoners and detainees was seen leaving Israel's Ofer prison. Crowds of cheering families and friends of the prisoners gathered in Beitunia for a glimpse of the bus.
Israel had delayed the release of more than 600 Palestinian prisoners since Saturday to protest what it called the cruel treatment of hostages during their handover by Hamas.
The militant group had called Israel's delay a "serious violation" of the ceasefire and said talks on a second phase were not possible until the Palestinians were freed.
The release of the bodies was carried out without ceremony, as opposed to past Hamas releases with stage-managed events in front of crowds. Israel, along with the Red Cross and UN officials, had described the ceremonies as humiliating for the hostages.
A number of women and teenagers detained since the militant group's attack on Israel on 7 October 2023, which sparked the conflict in Gaza, were included in the exchange.
A Hamas source said the prisoners and detainees due to be released include 445 men and 24 women and minors arrested in Gaza, as well as 151 prisoners serving life sentences for deadly attacks on Israelis.
Only around 50 Palestinians will be released into the occupied West Bank and east Jerusalem in this round, while many sentenced to life over deadly attacks on Israelis will be exiled out of the Palestinian territories, taken to Egypt at least temporarily until other countries accept them.
The handover completes both sides' obligations under the first phase of the ceasefire, during which Hamas returned 33 hostages, including eight bodies, in exchange for nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners.
The family of one hostage in Gaza said it had been notified he was dead and his body was among those to be returned. Tsachi Idan was taken from Kibbutz Nahal Oz. His eldest daughter, Maayan, was killed as militants shot through the door of the safe room.
The ceasefire's six-week first phase expires this weekend. US President Donald Trump 's Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, has said he wants the sides to move into negotiations on the second phase, during which all remaining hostages held by Hamas would be released and an end to the war would be negotiated.
Talks on the second phase were supposed to begin in the first week of February.
Tens of thousands of Israelis lined highways as the bodies of a mother and her two young sons, killed in captivity in Gaza, were taken for burial on Wednesday. The bodies of Shiri Bibas and her sons, 9-month-old Kfir and 4-year-old Ariel, were handed over earlier this month.
Israel says forensic evidence shows the children were killed by their captors in November 2023, while Hamas says the family was killed along with their guards in an Israeli air strike.
With people living in tent camps and damaged buildings in Gaza in chilly weather, health officials said another infant had died of hypothermia, bringing the toll to seven in two weeks.
Temperatures have been below 10C (50F) at night and the past few days have been particularly cold.
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Spectator
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Why Australia is recognising Palestine
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No amount of German or western guilt over the Holocaust would make accept the idea that Jewish supremacy in Palestine was somehow desirable, or just. I think that continues to be true for the overwhelming majority of Palestinians. Possibly, for the overwhelming majority of humanity in the post-colonial global south. That's not to say that the political process – which commenced in Madrid and Oslo –wasn't undertaken in good faith by sincere and earnest people. I know some of the negotiators on the Palestinian side, like Diana Buttu, a principled advocate for Palestinian rights for decades now. Daniel Levy, who negotiated for the Israelis, has been an outspoken opponent of Israeli apartheid and the genocide in Gaza, and a formidable critic of the peace process in the past 20 years. At its height in 1995, the Oslo process, which was supposed to produce a Palestinian state, but more importantly, an end to claims, commanded the support of two-thirds of Palestinians. Many of them, like my parents, were prepared to close a chapter on history, to swallow their grievances so that their children may live. Similarly, the Palestinian negotiators I've met in the past two decades each understood the basic deficit of justice, the imbalance in the ledger, but they sought to abort a conflict which has ravenously claimed the future at every turn. In many cases their intentions were honorable. And yet, the failure of the Peace Process was pre-ordained, readily apprehensible to anyone who lived in the Occupied Territories in the 1990s, when the settlements truly metastasized. It should have been obvious to anyone with a map and a history book, too. That's because Zionism, Israel's animating ideology, adheres to classically European colonialism, which continues to be the best framework for understanding Palestine/Israel. Writing in October 2003 in the New York Review of Books, the moral thinker and historian Tony Judt described Israel as 'an anachronism', essentially a throwback to the Belgian Congo or 18th century Australia. Israel's extermination of native life in Gaza is anachronistic, too. It rhymes, in the worst way. There were glaring structural reasons for Oslo's failure as well. The fact that many of the American negotiators were Zionists was under-reported, and under-appreciated. Dennis Ross, who led the American team, is a Zionist, indistinguishable to my eyes from Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak, two former Israeli prime ministers. Bill Clinton, who was president at the time, recently referred to 'Judea and Samaria', coded Zionist language for the occupied West Bank. In effect, Oslo pitted a stateless people against two nuclear-armed states led by people who were fundamentally invested in Jewish supremacy in Palestine. Emmanuel Macron's decision to recognize a Palestinian state in September amounts to little, as Donald Trump noted. I do not know Macron's intentions, but the Palestinians have never really warmed to European and American condescension, which is implicit in every conditional statement, every contingent incrementalism. Mark Carney's strange, confused statement that Canada would only accept a 'Zionist Palestinian state' is grimly entertaining for anyone with a basic grasp of the issues. Anyone who isn't a dilettante, in other words. Now, in the midst of a genocide, the Palestinians are best served by abandoning any effort to attain self-rule in the Occupied Territories. A reorientation towards basic rights is overdue, along with recognition the Palestinian struggle was never really about a seat at the United Nations, representation in Unesco, or Fifa. The force of the Palestinian cause rests in one principle: justice. Two years ago I thought justice meant a single state with equal rights between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea. But now, the Palestinians are confronted by a difficulty: no one is able to articulate what justice means in the wake of so much slaughter, of so many dead men, women and children, dead babies. The genocide has changed my perspective on the majority of Jewish Israelis, and once they retire their guns and mortars – as one day they surely will – we will have to reckon with the moral, and actual, wreckage of their century-long Sturm und Drang, their violent ejaculations, in Palestine. Ahmed Moor is a writer and fellow at the Foundation for Middle East Peace
