The Associated Press
Three Israeli hostages were released from Gaza Sunday and handed over to Israeli forces there in the first test of a fragile ceasefire between Israel and Hamas that took effect Sunday morning.
The three hostages, all women, are Romi Gonen, 24, kidnapped from the Nova music festival, and Emily Damari, 28, and Doron Steinbrecher, 31, who were kidnapped from Kibbutz Kfar Aza.
Later on Sunday, Israel is expected to release around 90 Palestinian prisoners, including 69 women.
U.S. President Joe Biden, who spoke Sunday while visiting a church in North Charleston, South Carolina, said “the guns in Gaza have gone silent” under a ceasefire deal he outlined in May.
Biden said he had been notified that the hostages had been released, saying, “They appear to be in good health.”
Biden said it now falls on the Trump administration to help implement the deal.
“I was pleased to have our team speak as one voice in the final days. It was both necessary and effective and unprecedented,” Biden said. “Success is going to require persistence and continuing support for our friends in the region, and the belief in diplomacy backed by deterrence,” the president said.
In coming weeks, assuming the ceasefire holds, another 33 captives are set for release over a six-week period. In exchange, Israel will release almost 2,000 Palestinian prisoners and Palestinians from Gaza who have been detained.
The ceasefire went into force at 11:15 a.m. local time on Sunday, or 6:15 am Eastern time, after an almost three-hour delay. It was brokered by mediators from the United States, Qatar and Egypt over months of indirect talks between the warring sides.
In the hostage release Sunday, Israeli media, carrying live footage from Qatar-based Al Jazeera TV, showed the hostages walking between vehicles as their convoy moved through Gaza City, surrounded by a huge crowd, with many people holding up phones and filming.
The vehicles were accompanied by armed men who wore green Hamas headbands and struggled to guard the cars from an unruly crowd that swelled into the thousands.
The hostages were taken during a Hamas-led attach on Oct. 7, 2023, on southern Israel that killed some 1,200 people and left some 250 others captive. Nearly 100 hostages remain in Gaza.
Israel responded to the Oct. 7 attack with an offensive that has killed more than 46,000 Palestinians, according to local health officials, who do not distinguish between civilians and militants but say women and children make up more than half the dead.
In Ramallah, West Bank, families and friends of some of the Palestinians prisoners set to be released from Israel gathered as cars honked and people waved the Palestinian flag.
Fadia Barghouti was arrested from Ramallah in April and spent three months in prison without being given a reason, she said. Tonight she hopes to see friends she had been detained with.
“I’m happy, because of the ceasefire people can live peacefully,” she said.
She said the war in Gaza is evidence that no one in the Middle East can live peacefully until Palestinians have their rights.
President-elect Donald Trump’s choice for national security adviser said Sunday the Gaza ceasefire deal should be “celebrated.”
“We will see three women coming out alive,” Michael Waltz, Trump’s pick to be his national security advisor, told CBS. “Had we not entered this, these people would have died.”
Waltz said the hostages held by Hamas have been captive longer than U.S. hostages held during the Iranian crisis in 1979, “but now we’re going to have a Reagan moment.”
That recalled those hostage being freed after 444 days when Ronald Reagan took office in 1981.
“We’re going to have President Trump being sworn-in as hostages are coming out alive,” Waltz said.
Israeli government spokesman David Mencer told journalists that “both Trump and Biden have given full backing to Israel’s right to return to the fighting if it reaches the conclusion that the second stage of negotiations is ineffectual.”
Mencer added, however, that Israel wants “all stages” of the phased ceasefire deal to come into effect. Negotiations on the ceasefire’s second phase are to start in just over two weeks.
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz in a separate statement reiterated that Israel won’t stop the war until everyone returns home. He added that “we will take care to maintain the buffer zones and respond forcefully to any violation and threat.” Israeli forces are withdrawing to buffer zones inside Gaza in the first phase.
