Hamas has handed over the bodies of four hostages, and Israel has released some Palestinian prisoners, as a five-week-old ceasefire agreed by the two sides in January appeared to get back on track after a breach that had brought fears of a return to a war in Gaza.
The bodies of the hostages were transferred to the Red Cross in southern Gaza and driven to the border point at Kerem Shalom at about midnight. Meanwhile, a convoy of buses carrying Palestinian prisoners arrived in the West Bank city of Ramallah.
It was unclear how many Palestinians were being released overnight on Wednesday, and whether the exchange would include all 602 prisoners who had been due to be released by Israel on Saturday in exchange for six surviving Israeli hostages.
The six hostages had been transferred by Hamas according to the agreed schedule but, as the Palestinian prisoners sat in buses on Saturday night waiting to be transferred, the government of Benjamin Netanyahu at the last moment decided not to release them and returned them to their cells.
The government said it had stopped the exchange in protest at what it complained were the propaganda ceremonies Hamas staged to hand over hostages and the remains of the Israelis who had been killed while in captivity.
Since then, Hamas agreed to hand over the four hostages’ bodies away from the cameras, and in return Netanyahu’s government said it would proceed with the prisoner releases. However, the Israeli prison authorities did not specify when the Palestinians would be freed in one go. One Israeli official was quoted in reports as saying that they would be released in batches.
The bodies handed over to the Red Cross just after midnight on Thursday morning were named by Hamas as Shlomo Mantzur, Tsachi Idan, Ohad Yahalomi and Itzhak Elgarat. The IDF said the identities of the bodies had not yet been verified.
The exchange and the resumption of the ceasefire deal came after a national day of grief in Israel with thousands of Israelis waving flags, holding candles and singing the national anthem, lining the route of a funeral procession for two small children and their mother who were held hostage and died in captivity in Gaza.
The bodies of the Bibases were handed over last week by Hamas, which claimed they had been killed by airstrikes. An Israeli autopsy report ruled the children had been murdered by their captors and then mutilated to simulate wounds from bombing.
The funeral was held in the town of Tzohar, near the border with Gaza and the kibbutz of Nir Oz, where the family lived. The ceremony was private but mourners lined the road from the central city of Rishon LeZion holding Israeli flags and yellow banners, symbol of the hostage families and supporters, to watch the cortege go by.
The children and their mother were to be buried alongside Shiri’s parents, who were killed in the Hamas attack on Nir Oz and other Israeli communities on 7 October 2023. Her husband and the boys’ father, Yarden, was also taken hostage in the Hamas attack, but was released under the ceasefire deal earlier this month, and discovered only then that his family had been killed.
The Bibas family have denounced Netanyahu and members of his government for making public graphic details of the two boys’ deaths. “This is outright abuse of a family that has already been enduring hell for 16 months,” Ofri Bibas, Yarden’s sister, said.
Describing the funeral procession on Wednesday, she said. “Through the car window, I see a broken country; we won’t recover until the last hostage returns home.”
In her address at the funeral, Ofri was bitterly critical of the Netanyahu government for prioritising the destruction of Hamas over an earlier negotiated hostage release. “Our disaster as a people and as a family should not have happened, and it must not, must not happen again,” she said. “They could have saved you and preferred revenge.”
With the transfer of the four hostages’ bodies and the release of the 600 Palestinians, the two side will have completed the obligations for the first six-week phase of the ceasefire. The second phase, due to start at the weekend, includes the release of all remaining hostages, and the complete withdrawal of the Israeli military from Gaza, but negotiations on the details had not begun just a few days before the weekend deadline.
One possibility being studied to keep the ceasefire alive while the second phase is being negotiated is to extend the first phase, but it is yet to be agreed whether more hostages and prisoners would be released during the extension.
