Israel, Hamas agree to ceasefire deal to pause war in Gaza

Annmarie Hordern and Fiona MacDonald, Bloomberg News on Jan 15, 2025

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Israel and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire deal that calls for releasing dozens of hostages and bringing a temporary halt to the war in the Gaza Strip that has killed tens of thousands of people in the last 15 months and touched off broader turmoil across the Middle East.

The ceasefire will start Sunday and last six weeks, Qatari and US officials said. Thirty-three hostages captured after Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 will be released, while Israel will withdraw from populated areas of the Gaza Strip and release hundreds of Palestinian prisoners.

President Joe Biden and President-elect Donald Trump, whose envoy Steven Witkoff was involved in the latest conversations, both took credit for the deal. Trump said it could have only happened with his November election victory, even though he has yet to take office, while Biden said it was the result of painstaking American diplomacy over many months.

The agreement would pause fighting that has all but destroyed Gaza, a strip of land on the Mediterranean coast controlled by Hamas militants that’s home to more than 2 million people. A truce will also lead to an increase in humanitarian aid to the territory, Biden said.

“During the next six weeks, Israel will negotiate the necessary arrangements to get to phase two, which is a permanent end of the war,” Biden said in a speech from the White House. He was flanked by Vice President Kamala Harris and Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

Hours after the deal was announced, however, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said in a statement that several details still needed to be worked out. In a separate statement, Netanyahu thanked Trump for his help in advancing the release of the hostages and said he would meet Trump in Washington soon. Netanyahu also spoke to Biden and thanked him for his help, according to the statement.

Hamas said in a statement that the accord was the result of “the legendary resilience of our great Palestinian people.”

A person familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified discussing private assessments, said negotiators believe 24 of the 33 hostages set to be released in the first phase of the ceasefire are alive.

Among the hostages to be released in the first phase is Keith Siegel, an Israeli-American who was captured in the Oct. 7 attack, according to a senior Biden administration official who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity. The official said the US is committed to getting all Americans out of Gaza, both those who are alive and those who died while in captivity.

Word of the ceasefire sparked celebrations on the streets in the Gaza Strip and offered at least tentative hope of a letup in violence. The conflict has caused turmoil in the wider Middle East, with other Iran-backed groups, including Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen, attacking Israel in solidarity with Hamas. Israel stepped up an offensive against Hezbollah in September, killing its top leaders and severely degrading the group in a ground and aerial campaign that ended with a truce in late November.

Israel’s actions also sparked a backlash, with a United Nations special envoy saying there were reasonable grounds to conclude that the country had committed genocide in Gaza. Rights groups including Amnesty International came to the same conclusion.

Although Israel and the Biden administration rejected that conclusion, the US and other Group of Seven nations repeatedly urged Netanyahu to do more to protect civilians in Gaza, over whose plight the Israeli leader is wanted on charges of war crimes before the International Criminal Court.

The ceasefire comes more then a year after a week-long truce in November 2023 under which more than 100 hostages were released in return for hundreds of Palestinian detainees. Since then, Israeli forces have overrun much of Gaza in their bid to destroy Hamas as both a military and governing force. Hamas holdouts have managed to keep fighting in some parts of the enclave.

“Finally, the focus can turn from military operations to political processes and saving human lives,” said Dana Stroul, a Pentagon official until 2023 who’s now at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “The strategic table has been reset.”

The Houthis have all but shut the southern Red Sea to Western ships with persistent missile and drone attacks, while Iran and Israel briefly exchanged direct fire in April and October.

Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis are all designated terrorist organizations by the US and many other countries.

Hamas triggered the conflict by attacking Israel in surprise raids on Oct. 7, 2023, killing more than 1,200 people and taking about 250 hostage. More than 46,000 Palestinians have been killed in the subsequent Israeli military campaign, according to the health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza, while much of the territory’s urban centers have been destroyed. Israel, which has lost hundreds of soldiers to the fighting, says it has killed about 20,000 Palestinian gunmen in Gaza.

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(With assistance from Alisa Odenheimer, Dan Williams, Iain Marlow, Akayla Gardner, Skylar Woodhouse and Golnar Motevalli.)