The Israeli military said it had received all 20 hostages confirmed to be alive, after their transfer from Gaza by the Red Cross. The announcement prompted cheering, hugging and weeping among thousands waiting at “Hostage Square” in Tel Aviv.
In Gaza, thousands of relatives, many weeping with joy, gathered at a hospital where buses brought home some of the nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners and detainees to be freed by Israel as part of the accord.
“The skies are calm, the guns are silent, the sirens are still and the sun rises on a Holy Land that is finally at peace,” Trump told the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, saying a “long nightmare” for both Israelis and Palestinians was over.
He later left for a summit in Egypt intended to cement the truce.
The US, along with Egypt, Qatar and Turkiye, mediated what has been described as a first phase agreement between Israel and Hamas for a ceasefire and the release of hostages by Hamas and prisoners and detainees by Israel.
Trump arrived in the Egyptian beach resort of Sharm el-Sheikh about an hour before sundown for the gathering of more than 20 world leaders, which he was to chair alongside President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.
At the opening of the summit, Trump signed a document on the ceasefire deal with Egypt, Qatar and Turkiye.
The ceasefire and partial Israeli withdrawal agreed last week halted one of Israel’s biggest offensives of the war, an all-out assault on Gaza City that was killing scores of people per day.
Since then, huge numbers of Palestinians have been able to return to the ruins of homes in the Gaza Strip, swathes of which were reduced to a wasteland by Israeli bombardment that killed 68,000 people.
Among the immediate issues still to be resolved: recovering the remains of another 26 Israeli hostages believed to have died and two whose fates are unknown.
Hamas says recovering the bodies could take time as not all burial sites are known. It handed over four bodies Monday.
Aid supplies must be rushed into the enclave, where hundreds of thousands of people face famine. UN aid chief Tom Fletcher underlined the need to “get shelter and fuel to people who desperately need it and to massively scale up the food and medicine and other supplies going in”.
Beyond that, crucial issues have yet to be resolved, including how to govern and police Gaza, and the ultimate future of Hamas, which still rejects Israel’s demands to disarm.
Video footage captured emotional scenes of Israeli families receiving phone messages from their loved ones as they were being released, their faces lighting up with disbelief and hope after months of anguish.
Palestinians meanwhile rushed to embrace prisoners freed by Israel.
Several thousand gathered inside and around Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis in southern Gaza, some waving Palestinian flags, others holding photos of their relatives.
“I am happy for our sons who are being freed, but we are still in pain for all those who have been killed by the occupation, and all the destruction that happened to our Gaza,” a Gaza woman, Um Ahmed, told Reuters in a tearful voice message.
Freed prisoners arrived in buses, some of them posing from the windows, flashing V-for-Victory signs.
Israel was due to release 1,700 detainees it captured in Gaza, as well as 250 prisoners from its jails convicted or suspected of security offences.
Samer Halabeya, a doctor freed from jail where he was serving a sentence for planning an attack that wounded an Israeli officer, stood by his weeping mother in Ramallah in the occupied West Bank.
“We hope that everyone gets freed,” he said.
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