JERUSALEM: Israel’s Cabinet approved a deal early Saturday for a ceasefire in Gaza that would release dozens of hostages held there and pause the 15-month war with Hamas, bringing the sides a step closer to ending their deadliest and most destructive fighting ever.
The government announced the approval after 1 a.m. Jerusalem time and confirmed the ceasefire will go into effect on Sunday. The hourslong Cabinet meeting went well past the beginning of the Jewish Sabbath, a sign of the moment’s importance. In line with Jewish law, the Israeli government usually halts all business for the Sabbath except in emergency cases of life or death.
Mediators Qatar and the United States announced the ceasefire on Wednesday, but the deal was in limbo for more than a day as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insisted there were last-minute complications that he blamed on the Hamas militant group. On Friday, the smaller security Cabinet recommended approving the deal.
Key questions remain about the ceasefire — the second achieved during the war — including the names of the 33 hostages who are to be released during the first, six-week phase and who among them is still alive.
Netanyahu instructed a special task force to prepare to receive the hostages. The 33 are women, children, men over 50 and sick or wounded people. Hamas has agreed to free three female hostages on Day 1 of the deal, four on Day 7 and the remaining 26 over the following five weeks.
Palestinian detainees are to be released as well. Israel’s justice ministry published a list of 700 to be freed in the deal’s first phase and said the release will not begin before 4 p.m. local time Sunday. All people on the list are younger or female.
Israel’s Prison Services said it will transport the prisoners instead of the International Committee of the Red Cross, which handled transportation during the first ceasefire, to avoid “public expressions of joy.” The prisoners have been accused of crimes like incitement, vandalism, supporting terror, terror activities, attempted murder or throwing stones or Molotov cocktails.
The largely devastated Gaza should see a surge in humanitarian aid. Trucks carrying aid lined up Friday on the Egyptian side of the Rafah border crossing into Gaza.
An Egyptian official said an Israeli delegation from the military and Israel’s Shin Bet internal security agency arrived Friday in Cairo to discuss the reopening of the crossing. An Israeli official confirmed a delegation was going to Cairo. Both spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the private negotiations.
Israeli forces will also pull back from many areas in Gaza during the first phase of the ceasefire and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians will be able to return to what’s left of their homes.
“Once Sunday comes around, we would be happier, God willing,” one of Gaza’s displaced people, Ekhlas Al-Kafarna, said during the wait for word on the Israeli Cabinet decision.
Israel’s military said that as its forces gradually withdraw from specific locations and routes in Gaza, residents will not be allowed to return to areas where troops are present or near the Israel-Gaza border, and any threat to Israeli forces “will be met with a forceful response.”
Ceasefire talks had stalled repeatedly in previous months. But Israel and Hamas had been under growing pressure from both the Biden administration and President-elect Donald Trump to reach a deal before Trump takes office on Monday.
Hamas triggered the war with its Oct. 7, 2023, cross-border attack into Israel that killed some 1,200 people and left some 250 others captive. Nearly 100 hostages remain in Gaza.
Israel responded with a devastating 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.
Fighting continued into Friday, and Gaza’s Health Ministry said 88 bodies had arrived at hospitals in the past 24 hours. In previous conflicts, both sides stepped up military operations in the final hours before ceasefires as a way to project strength.
The second — and much more difficult — phase of the ceasefire is meant to be negotiated during the first. The remainder of the hostages, including male soldiers, are to be released during this phase.
But Hamas has said it will not release the remaining captives without a lasting ceasefire and a full Israeli withdrawal, while Israel has vowed to keep fighting until it dismantles the group and to maintain open-ended security control over the territory.
Longer-term questions about postwar Gaza remain, including who will rule the territory or oversee the daunting task of reconstruction.
The conflict has destabilized the Middle East and sparked worldwide protests. It also highlighted political tensions inside Israel, drawing fierce resistance from Netanyahu’s far-right coalition partners.
On Thursday, Israel’s hard-line national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, threatened to quit the government if Israel approved the ceasefire. He reiterated that Friday, writing on social media platform X: “If the ‘deal’ passes, we will leave the government with a heavy heart.”
There was no immediate sign early Saturday that he had done so.
Ben-Gvir’s resignation would not bring down the government or derail the ceasefire deal, but the move would destabilize the government at a delicate moment and could eventually lead to its collapse if Ben-Gvir were joined by other key Netanyahu allies.

NEW YORK CITY: The head of the largest aid agency for Palestinians has warned that the full implementation of a new Israeli law preventing its workers from operating within the country would be “catastrophic” for Gaza, “massively” weaken the international humanitarian response there, and make already “dire and catastrophic” living conditions “immeasurably” worse.

It would also undermine the Gaza ceasefire agreement, said Philippe Lazzarini, the commissioner general of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine refugees.

He was speaking in New York where he earlier briefed the UN Security Council on the plight of the UNRWA, less than two weeks before the Israeli ban on the agency is due to take effect.

Lazzarini welcomed the recent ceasefire agreement and hostage-release deal in Gaza as a “starting point,” and stressed the “absolute” need for “rapid, unfettered” access for humanitarians to respond to the “tremendous suffering” in the territory.

The anti-UNRWA legislation, approved overwhelmingly by the Knesset in October, would bar the agency from operating within Israel and ban the country’s authorities from any contact with it.

The delivery of aid to Gaza and the West Bank requires close coordination between UNRWA and Israeli authorities. If the legislation is implemented as planned, Israel would no longer issue agency staff with work or entry permits, and the coordination with the Israeli military that is essential for ensuring safe passage for aid deliveries will no longer be possible.

Since the start of the war in Gaza, Israel has relentlessly condemned and attacked the aid agency. More than 260 of its staff have been killed; its schools, where displaced Palestinians sought shelter, were bombed; and a coordinated Israeli media campaign has attempted to discredit the agency by portraying it as a tool of Hamas.

Lazzarini said that though the Israeli government suggests the services provided by UNRWA could be delivered by other agencies, its mandate and capacity to provide public services to an entire population — including education for more than 600,000 Palestinian children, and healthcare — are “unique and far exceed any other entity.”

This means “these services, in reality, can only be transferred to a functioning state public institution,” said Lazzarini, adding that this is in line with the aims of the Global Alliance for the Implementation of the Two-State Solution, initiated last year by Saudi Arabia, the EU and the Arab League.

“UNRWA’s services are also tightly woven into the social fabric of Gaza,” he said. “The disintegration of the agency would intensify the breakdown of social order. So dismounting UNRWA outside the political process would undermine the ceasefire agreement, and sabotage Gaza’s recovery and the political transition.”

Turning to the situation in the West Bank, Lazzarini said the Palestinian Authority has stated clearly that it does not have the financial resources or capacity to make up for any loss of UNRWA services.

“A chaotic dismantling of UNRWA will irreversibly harm the lives and the future of the Palestinians, and I believe it will obliterate their trust in the international community and any solution it attempts to facilitate,” he added.

He reminded the Security Council during his briefing earlier in the day of “the fierce global disinformation campaign” mounted against the agency, and what he described as “the intense diplomatic lobbying by the government of Israel, as well as affiliated nongovernmental organizations, targeting UNRWA and governments of donor countries.”

According to Knesset figures, Israel has allocated an additional $150 million to its 2025 propaganda budget in an effort to reshape global opinions about its actions in Gaza, which critics allege amount to genocide.

Lazzarini said that “misinformation campaigns” have endangered UNRWA staff in the West Bank and Gaza, where 269 of them had been killed as of Friday.

“It has also created a permissive environment for the harassment of UN representatives wherever they are, including in Europe and in the United States,” he added.

Lazzarini said he urged the Security Council and UN member states to do what they can to persuade Israel not to implement the new legislation, and to ensure that the funding crisis the UNRWA faces does not abruptly halt the life-saving services it provides.

The agency was established by UN General Assembly in the aftermath of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War to provide direct relief and works programs for Palestinian refugees.

Lazzarini said the attacks against the agency are attacks on the international multilateral system itself. While UN member states and donor countries, including EU countries, continue to publicly assert that UNRWA is irreplaceable in the absence of a Palestinian state, these statements of support have not been backed up by pressure on Israel to rethink its ban on the agency.

Asked by Arab News about this discrepancy between public statements of support and meaningful action, and whether or not it means Western countries are, through lack of action, undermining the very multilateral values upon which they were founded, Lazzarini said: “The same question could be asked about the importance of international humanitarian law and the blatant and constant disregard of that law.

“You can ask the same question about the disrespect for the resolutions of the Security Council and the General Assembly. And you can ask the same question about” the International Court of Justice’s ruling that Israel’s presence in the West Bank and East Jerusalem is illegal, and the court’s call for its withdrawal.

“And so it’s obviously frustrating,” Lazzarini added. “What we have witnessed is an extraordinary ‘crisis of impunity,’ to the extent that international humanitarian law is almost becoming irrelevant if no mechanism is put in place to address this impunity.”