Live Updates: Israel’s Cease-Fire Deal With Hamas to Take Effect Sunday

The Israeli security cabinet approved the deal on Friday morning, two days after it was announced, and the full cabinet followed with final approval during a meeting that continued into the Jewish Sabbath. Israeli civilians will have a short window to file objections, but the courts are widely expected to allow the agreement to go forward.

In announcing the timing of the start of the cease-fire, Majed al-Ansari, a spokesman for Qatar’s Foreign Ministry, urged Gaza residents to be cautious. “Wait for directions from official sources,” he said in a statement. Qatar, alongside Egypt and the United States, mediated the cease-fire talks.

U.S. and other diplomats see the deal as the best chance to end the war, which began after Hamas led an attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing 1,200 people and taking 250 hostage. Israel’s ensuing military campaign has leveled much of Gaza. Tens of thousands of Palestinians and hundreds of Israeli troops have been killed.

Under the terms of the deal, Israel and Hamas will observe a 42-day truce, during which Hamas will release 33 of the roughly 98 hostages it still holds. In exchange, over 1,000 Palestinian prisoners are to be freed. Dozens of the hostages are believed to be dead.

During the truce, the deal calls for negotiations on an end to the war and the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza. It is not clear how long the cease-fire will hold, and the negotiations are likely to be bitter and difficult. Mr. Netanyahu also faces internal rifts in his governing coalition over the deal.

Here’s what else to know:

• Aid for Gaza: 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. However, an Israeli ban on the operation of UNRWA, the U.N. agency that is the main administrator of aid in the territory, is set to go into effect in about two weeks.

• Strikes in Gaza: The Palestinian Civil Defense, an emergency service organization, said Friday that Israeli strikes had killed more than 100 people since the cease-fire deal was announced, a figure that could not be independently verified.

• Israeli preparations: Health officials have been preparing isolated areas at hospitals where freed hostages can begin recuperating in privacy. Israel’s Health Ministry has drafted an extensive protocol for their psychological and physical treatment. In particular, there are concerns that they might be severely malnourished.

The first hostage-for-prisoner swap will begin no earlier than 4 p.m. on Sunday, according to the deal. Here is what else we know about how the plan foresees their release.

Who are the hostages being released?

The 33 hostages who will be released in the first phase include female captives who are alive and dead, civilian teenage boys and children, men 50 and older, female soldiers and sick and wounded civilians.

Israeli authorities believe that around 35 of the remaining captives in Gaza are dead. According to the agreement, human remains will be released after hostages who are alive have been freed.

In a televised address on Saturday evening, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, said “most” of the 33 hostages who will be freed under the agreement are alive.

How will the release work?

The releases will be staggered, according to the plan. On the first day, Hamas will release three female hostages who are alive in exchange for Palestinian prisoners. On the seventh day, four female hostages who are alive will be exchanged for Palestinian prisoners.

From the 14th day through the fifth week of the agreement, Palestinian prisoners will be released every seven days in exchange for three male and female hostages.

The remaining hostages agreed to in the first phase will be released in exchange for Palestinian prisoners during the sixth week.

Also during the sixth week, once all 33 hostages have been freed and returned to Israel, Israel will release 47 prisoners who were rearrested after being released in a 2011 deal that saw over 1,000 Palestinians freed in exchange for a captive Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit.

Israeli authorities have established three reception points to receive the hostages along the Gaza border, according to an Israeli military official who spoke on condition of anonymity in accordance with protocol. Those reception points will be staffed by Israeli soldiers, doctors and psychologists, said the official.

How many Palestinian prisoners will be freed?

Dozens of Palestinians held in Israel will be released for each hostage in the initial six week phase, including some serving life sentences.

The deal outlines the criteria of the hostage-for-prisoner swap. According to the agreement, the release of a hostage or Israeli civilian who is 18 or younger and is alive requires the release of 30 Palestinian prisoners who are women or children.

An Israeli civilian man who is 50 or older and is alive can be freed in exchange for 30 Palestinian prisoners. An Israeli female soldier who is alive requires the release of 50 Palestinian prisoners. A total of 110 Palestinian prisoners will be released in exchange for nine Israeli male civilians who are wounded or sick.

How many hostages have already been released?

Early in the war, Hamas released four hostages — two Israeli-American women, Judith Raanan, then 59, and her daughter, Natalie Raanan, then 17, and two Israeli women, Nurit Cooper, then 79, and Yocheved Lifshitz, then 85, citing humanitarian reasons. More than 100 hostages were freed in November 2023 during a staggered truce between Israel and Hamas. In exchange, about 240 Palestinians held in Israel were released.

In addition to those who have already been released, eight hostages have been freed in Israeli military operations since the start of the war.

How many hostages left in Gaza are Americans?

In a speech on Tuesday, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said seven Americans were still being held captive. Edan Alexander and Sagui Dekel-Chen were believed to be alive as of December, according to the American Jewish Council.

A few of the remaining five were declared dead early in the war. Their bodies remain in Gaza.

Ephrat Livni and Aaron Boxerman contributed reporting.

Pitching the deal to the Israeli public, Netanyahu said the cease-fire agreement preserves Israel’s right to return to the war against Hamas if it so chose. The agreement also allows Israeli forces to remain in a buffer zone along Israel’s border with Gaza and Gaza’s border with Egypt, Netanyahu 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,” Netanyahu said.

Netanyahu added that Israel’s right to continue the war if necessary enjoyed the backing of the United States.

The truce between Israel and Hamas includes three phases, beginning with an initial 42-day cease-fire. Netanyahu just said that President Biden and President-elect Donald J. Trump “fully backed Israel’s right to go back to fighting” if Israel were to decide that further negotiations with Hamas on the second stage were fruitless.

The cease-fire agreement with Hamas will bring home 33 hostages, “most of them alive,” Netanyahu added.

The Israeli military has published a map of restricted zones during the upcoming cease-fire, suggesting that its forces will redeploy to those areas. The restricted zones include a buffer zone along the border with Gaza and the area surrounding the so-called Netzarim corridor, which horizontally bisects the enclave.

“The Israel Defense Forces remain deployed in specific areas of the Gaza Strip,” Avichay Adraee, an Israeli military spokesman, wrote on social media. He added that approaching any areas where Israeli troops were deployed was dangerous.

Here are several of the most prominent Palestinian prisoners set to be released under the cease-fire, according to the Israeli Justice Ministry.

Zakaria Zubeidi

Over the past two decades, Zakaria Zubeidi, 49, has been a militant, a theater director, and an escaped prisoner whose flight stunned Israelis and Palestinians alike.

Mr. Zubeidi rose to prominence as a militant leader during the Second Intifada, or uprising, in the early 2000s, during which Palestinian militants committed deadly attacks against Israelis, including suicide bombings targeting civilian thoroughfares.

Israel responded by reoccupying major Palestinian cities amid street battles. Some of the toughest fighting took place in the Palestinian city of Jenin, Mr. Zubeidi’s hometown. He later emerged as a top commander in the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, an armed militia loosely linked with the secular Fatah party, the dominant Palestinian political faction in the West Bank.

After the uprising, Mr. Zubeidi worked at a theater inside the hardscrabble Jenin refugee camp. In 2019, Israel arrested him again on charges that he had returned to militancy.

Two years later, Mr. Zubeidi and five other Palestinian prisoners conducted a jailbreak by crawling nearly 32 yards through an underground tunnel outside one of Israel’s maximum-security prisons. Although they were later recaptured, the security breach shook Israelis and thrilled Palestinians.

An Israeli drone strike killed Mr. Zubeidi’s son, Mohammad, in September. The Israeli military called the son a “significant terrorist” and said he had been involved in shooting at Israeli troops.

Wissam Abbasi, Mohammad Odeh and Wael Qassim

Wissam Abbasi, 48, Mohammad Odeh, 52, and Wael Qassim, 54, were jailed in 2002 on accusations of carrying out Hamas attacks against Israelis during the Second Intifada. According to Israel’s justice ministry, the three men were given life sentences for murder and a string of other crimes.

According to contemporary Israeli media reports, the men were among several convicted of being involved in a Hamas cell in Jerusalem that was responsible for a string of bombings that killed over 30 Israelis in crowded civilian areas.

The attacks included a Hamas bombing at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem that killed nine people, including four U.S. citizens, according to the Israeli authorities.

Mr. Odeh, who was working as a painter at the university, planted the bomb in a cafeteria and covered it with a newspaper, The New York Times reported at the time, citing Israeli officials. When he left, he remotely detonated the explosive with a cellphone, the officials said.

Under the terms of the cease-fire deal, the men will not be allowed to return to their homes in Jerusalem, according to the Israeli justice ministry. They will be required to live in exile, although it is unclear where they will be allowed to go.

Khalida Jarrar

One of the most prominent Palestinian prisoners expected to be released as early as Sunday is Khalida Jarrar, 62, a leader in the left-wing Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

Ms. Jarrar, a prominent activist for the rights of Palestinians jailed by Israel, was elected to the Palestinian Parliament in the 2006 elections.

The United States and the European Union consider the Popular Front a terrorist organization. The group became notorious in the late 1960s for a series of plane hijackings, as well as other attacks, including during the Second Intifada.

Ghassan Jarrar, her husband, said in a telephone interview that the Israeli authorities had not allowed him to visit his wife since her arrest in December 2023. He has grasped for any news of her condition he could get from rare visits by her lawyer, he said.

Ms. Jarrar has spent much of the past decade in and out of Israeli prison, although she has not been convicted of direct involvement in the Popular Front’s military activities. In 2015, she was sentenced to 15 months for incitement and belonging to a banned organization.

In recent years, Israel has mostly held Ms. Jarrar without formal charges. Rights groups call the practice a severe violation of due process, while Israel says it is necessary at times to protect sensitive intelligence.

In 2021, her daughter Suha died while Ms. Jarrar was being held in an Israeli prison. Israel denied a request to grant her a humanitarian furlough to attend the funeral.

Since the cease-fire agreement between Hamas and Israel was announced on Wednesday, the Gaza Civil Defense, an emergency services organization, has reported 122 deaths in the Gaza Strip, with 92 of those in Gaza City, in the north. Among the casualties were 33 children, the group said.

Late Friday, Wafa, the Palestinian Authority’s news agency, reported that three residents had been killed and others wounded in an Israeli drone strike in Al Tuffah, a neighborhood of Gaza City.

The reports could not be independently confirmed. The Israeli military did not immediately comment.

The cease-fire agreement is expected to go into effect on Sunday, and many Palestinians are anticipating those first moments of peace with both joy and trepidation.

In Jabaliya, in northern Gaza, Mariam Moeen Awwad, 23, a content writer displaced at least six times, shared her mixed emotions during what she described as the war’s final hours.

“It’s a mix of joy, sadness, and longing for a new beginning,” she said.

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 with relatives in another part of Jabaliya.

She longs to return to her own home but fears what she may find.

“I want to see my apartment,” she said. “If it’s even still there.”

The new deal marks the first time in more than 13 months — since a temporary truce in 2023 — that Israel and Hamas have agreed to stop fighting for longer than a few hours a day.

Here is a timeline of the hostage crisis and talks to reach a cease-fire in Gaza:

October 2023: Weeks into the war, Hamas released four hostages: a mother and daughter, with dual American and Israeli citizenship and, days later, two Israeli women. That month, Israel said it had rescued a soldier. Initial releases raised hopes among captives’ relatives that more hostages could soon be freed.

November 2023: More than 100 hostages were freed during a cease-fire that lasted about a week, in exchange for 240 Palestinians held in Israeli detention.

December 2023: Israeli troops mistakenly shot and killed three hostages in combat in Gaza, drawing outrage and despair from relatives of captives.

January 2024: The United States led a push for a deal, but Israel and Hamas staked out incompatible positions, especially on two issues: the length of any pause in fighting and the fate of Hamas leaders in Gaza.

February 2024: The Israeli military rescued two hostages in Rafah in southern Gaza. Dozens of people were killed in the operation, Gazan officials said.

March 2024: The family of Itay Chen, a dual Israeli-American citizen who had been serving in the Israeli military and was thought to be a living hostage in Gaza, said the Israeli military had told them that it had intelligence indicating that their son was killed on Oct. 7.

May 2024: President Biden called for a permanent cease-fire and endorsed what he said was an Israeli proposal, a move seen as an attempt to advance talks after months without progress.

June 2024: The Israeli military rescued four hostages in an operation that killed scores of Gazans: Palestinian health officials said 274 people were killed, and Israel put the total number of dead around 100. Days later, the United Nations Security Council adopted a cease-fire resolution, based on the proposal that Mr. Biden had endorsed. Israel and Hamas were noncommittal.

July 2024: Israel’s military retrieved the bodies of five hostages found in a tunnel shaft in southern Gaza — officials said they had been killed during the Oct. 7 attacks and taken as bargaining chips. (A third or more of the roughly 100 remaining hostages are thought to be dead.)

August 2024: Israeli forces said they recovered the bodies of six hostages in a tunnel in Gaza, five of whom were already believed dead. Later that month, the Israeli military rescued one hostage in an operation that killed at least 20 Gazans, according to the local authorities.

September 2024: The Israeli military said it found six dead hostages in Gaza. Among them was Hersh Goldberg-Polin, a 23-year-old Israeli-American whose parents spoke at the Democratic National Convention in August. Separately, the Israeli military said months after their bodies were recovered that an airstrike in 2023 may have killed three hostages.

October 2024: A year after the Oct. 7 attacks, some Israelis, including relatives of captives, were angry that Mr. Netanyahu did not prioritize the return of hostages. About 10 days later, the Israeli military announced that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, the architect of the Oct. 7 attack, had been killed in fighting in Gaza.

December 2024: The Israeli military said that Omer Neutra, an Israeli-American hostage whose parents spoke at the Republican National Convention in July, had been killed on Oct. 7, 2023. That day, President-elect Donald J. Trump warned in on social media that there would be “hell to pay” if the hostages were not released before his inauguration.

The Israeli military separately said it recovered the body of another hostage, and that an investigation suggested that an Israeli airstrike likely contributed to the deaths of some captives found so far.

January 2025: The Israeli military announced the deaths of two related hostages in the second week of the new year, a father and, days later, his adult son. In the waning days of the Biden administration, American officials continued to negotiate with Israel and mediators for Hamas from Qatar, and just days before Mr. Trump was sworn in, negotiators said they closed a deal.

The total number of prisoners to be released and their identities were among the many contentious points involved in the negotiations for a deal. But the agreement says that in exchange for each hostage taken by Hamas during the attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Israel must free dozens of Palestinian prisoners, including some serving long sentences for attacks on Israelis.

During the last pause in the war in November 2023, Israel released 240 Palestinian prisoners and detainees in exchange for hostages. The majority of those released had not been convicted of a crime, and nearly half were under 18, including three girls. The oldest person released was a 64-year-old woman.

Even as Israel released Palestinians, it continued to imprison many more across Gaza, the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. Some of those released in the deal were later reimprisoned.

Israel said all of those released had been imprisoned for offenses related to its security, from throwing stones to more serious accusations like supporting terrorism and attempted murder. More than half of them had been prosecuted in Israeli military courts, which try Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

Nearly every Palestinian who is tried in the military courts is convicted. But many Palestinian prisoners are never even tried. Instead Israel detains them indefinitely without charges and based on secret evidence, under what is called administrative detention.

International human rights groups have long criticized Israel’s widespread use of administrative detention as violating international law and suppressing Palestinian political activity and expression.

Israel says imprisoned Palestinians, who have included avowed senior militants convicted of brutal attacks, are treated in accordance with international standards.

Aaron Boxerman contributed reporting from Jerusalem.

Air-raid sirens wailed in central Israel, including in Tel Aviv in Jerusalem, after an attack from Yemen, the Israeli authorities said in a statement. Explosions could be heard in the skies over central Israel as aerial defenses tried to intercept projectiles.

Houthi militants in Yemen have been firing rockets and drones at Israel in solidarity with Hamas in Gaza. The group’s leader, Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, said in a speech that this week that if Israel violates the cease-fire, the group, which is backed by Iran, will continue attacking.

UNRWA is the core agency for aid into Gaza, where it operates shelters and schools and provides primary health care for the majority of the population. It is also a major employer: Many of its 13,000 staff members in the territory are Palestinians.

In October, the Israeli Parliament, the Knesset, adopted a bill barring UNRWA from operating in the territory of the state of Israel and prohibiting Israeli officials from having contact with the agency, which would cripple its ability to deliver aid or operate within Gaza.

Israeli officials have asserted that Hamas members had infiltrated UNRWA; two U.N. investigations concluded that fewer than a dozen employees had ties to Hamas, and their employment was terminated. The United States and Sweden have continued to suspend funding.

Mr. Lazzarini, speaking to reporters at U.N. headquarters in New York, warned of the ban’s consequences. “Full implementation will be catastrophic,” he said. “In Gaza, it will massively weaken the international humanitarian response,” which he said would “immeasurably worsen already catastrophic living conditions.”

Mr. Lazzarini’s remarks came after he briefed the U.N. Security Council at a closed consultation on Friday morning. He told reporters that he had asked the Council to intervene to stop Israel from following through on the Knesset bill’s ban or risk chaos in Gaza. He said he also asked that the Council insist on a political path that clearly designated UNRWA as a provider of essential aid and to ensure that a financial crisis did not abruptly end the agency’s life- saving work.

UNRWA operates with the mandate of the U.N. General Assembly in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and in neighboring countries like Jordan and Syria, where Palestinian’s displaced in the founding of Israel have lived for decades. Israel has always had a contentious relationship with UNRWA, arguing for it to be dismantled.

Mr. Lazzarini said much was unclear about what would happen if the ban were fully put in place. He said UNRWA’s operations would have to halt in East Jerusalem, which Israeli claims, but that technically it could still work in Gaza, a Palestinian territory, and the West Bank, which is Palestinian but occupied by Israel. He said, however, that operations would be very challenging under the ban, which would block communications with Israeli officials on logistics and security.

The United Nations maintains that no other humanitarian agency currently working in Gaza has the operational capacity, infrastructure and staffing force to take over UNRWA’s work.

“These services in reality can only be transferred to a functioning state and government,” Mr. Lazzarini said.

At Israeli hospitals, health officials have been preparing isolated areas where the hostages can begin recuperating in privacy. Israel’s Health Ministry has drafted an extensive protocol for their psychological and physical treatment. There are particular concerns that they may be severely malnourished.

“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.”

After Hamas led the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, killing about 1,200 people and capturing about 250 others, about 105 Israeli and foreign hostages were freed in the weeklong truce in November that year. A few were later released in Israeli military operations, and Israeli soldiers recovered the bodies of dozens of others.

But around 98 hostages remained in Gaza, dozens of whom are presumed dead by the Israeli authorities.

Of the women, older men and other hostages returning under the first phase of this cease-fire deal, many are believed to have been held in the militant group’s warren of tunnels in Gaza, conditions likely to leave physical and psychological scars.

Health officials have been poring over every piece of intelligence — including the hostage videos — in an effort to discern the hostages’ condition, Dr. Mizrahi said. A committee of officials that includes Dr. Mizrahi has determined that some were killed.

Israeli officials say the logistics of the release will be broadly similar to those during the previous cease-fire, when 105 hostages were released in exchange for 240 Palestinians jailed in Israel.

In that exchange, Hamas fighters handed over hostages — mostly women and children — to the International Committee of the Red Cross. The Red Cross’s workers ferried the captives from Gaza in a marked ambulance to Egypt before taking them to Israel.

At the border crossing, Israeli intelligence agents verified their identities. Around the same time, Israeli security officials released a specified group of Palestinian women and teenage prisoners.

This time, the Israeli authorities have established three reception points 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.

From there, the hostages will be taken to the Israeli hospitals that have been preparing to care for them, the official said.

The 105 hostages released in November 2023 came home after roughly 50 days in captivity in Gaza. They arrived in a country that had fundamentally changed; some learned only then about friends and loved ones who had been killed in the Hamas-led attack.

At first, officials aimed to reintegrate returning hostages as quickly as possible, according to Dr. Mizrahi. Now, the health authorities recommend that the hostages being released remain in the hospital for at least four days, if not longer, she said.

In the meantime, the hostages’ family members — some of whom themselves survived captivity — can only wait.

“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.”