Under the terms of a US-brokered ceasefire, the Hamas terror group has released the last 20 Israeli hostages, in what US President Donald Trump called a new dawn for the Middle East, Reuters reports.
The Israeli military said it had received all live hostages taken from Gaza by the Red Cross. Palestinians freed by Israel have returned to the Gaza Strip and the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
Before leaving for Egypt for a summit on securing lasting peace in Gaza, Trump told the Israeli parliament that the skies were finally calm and the guns were silent. However, much remains to be done to bring peace to the Palestinian territories, and more work is needed to address the generations-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict and other causes of division in the Middle East.
The release of Israeli and Palestinian prisoners was a key element of the Gaza peace plan. More than
20 world leaders will meet in Egypt on the 13th of October to discuss the next steps in Trump’s 20-point plan.
Since the 7th of October, 2023, when a Hamas attack killed 1,200 people and captured 251, Israeli attacks on the Palestinian territories have killed more than 67,000 Palestinians, and the enclave has been a humanitarian disaster.
Both Israelis and Gazans welcomed the return of the prisoners and expressed hope that the war could end.
The Trump administration brokered the ceasefire deal with Egypt, Qatar and Turkey, and the next phase is expected to involve the creation of an international organization led by Trump. There are still plenty of things that can go wrong, and the issues that have torn apart previous truces must be resolved. These include the administration of the densely populated coastal enclave after the fighting ends and the fate of Hamas.
Other sticking points could include the complete withdrawal of the Israeli military from the Palestinian territories
and efforts to establish a Palestinian state, which Israeli politicians strongly oppose.
Trump is only the fourth U.S. president to address the Israeli parliament, and was given a standing ovation. The speaker of the parliament, Amir Ohana, announced that Israel would nominate Trump for the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize.
The remains of some of the dead prisoners are also expected to be returned on the 13th of October. A commission will also be set up to find the bodies of other prisoners in the rubble of Gaza. Two years of fighting have reduced Gaza to rubble, with almost all of its 2.2 million inhabitants homeless.
Buses carrying nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners, most of them captured during the war, have arrived in Gaza.
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