Israel agrees to hostage deal with Hamas

HIGHLIGHTS

A truce between Israel and Hamas will begin Friday at 7 a.m. local time (midnight ET), with 13 civilian hostages to be released by Hamas hours later, Qatar announced.

More will follow, with a total of 50 hostages freed over four days, while Palestinian prisoners are also released in waves.

The initial group of freed hostages will include members of the same families released together, a Qatari official said.

US President Joe Biden says he is hopeful a 3-year-old American girl will be among those freed.

Israel’s defense minister has vowed to continue the fight “forcefully” after the brief truce, saying he expects at least two more months of battle.

Israel heavily bombarded sites in Gaza Thursday.

Israel’s military also says it has arrested the director of Gaza’s largest hospital, Al-Shifa, on allegations it served as a Hamas command center. The group and hospital officials deny that charge.

14,854 killed including 5,850 children

The number of people killed in Gaza from Israeli attacks since October 7 now stands at 14,854, including 5,850 children, according to information from Hamas authorities in the strip.

Getting up-to-date information on the number of fatalities in Gaza has become harder as Israel’s massive air and ground campaign grinds on.

On Monday, the Palestinian Health Ministry in Ramallah, which takes its data from hospitals and other sources in the Gaza Strip, put the number killed at 12,700.

In health updates since then, the Ramallah-based ministry said serious disruptions to communications networks in Gaza have made its own efforts at accurate data collection impossible.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), which collects and audits data from across the occupied Palestinian territories, has continued to cite the figures originating from Gaza.

On Wednesday, UN OCHA chief Martin Griffiths told CNN the UN stood by its use of statistics from the Health Ministry in Gaza, saying his team had “triangulated [the numbers] over the years to make sure we feel confident about them.”

“We don’t put these figures out without thought,” he said.

Keeping fingers crossed

A senior adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke to the fragility of the hostage agreement with Hamas, saying he is keeping his “fingers crossed” it will go ahead. 

The hostage release was initially supposed to take place Thursday but was delayed until Friday. Regev said he couldn’t “go into the details” of why the plan was pushed back by a day. 

“All I can say is that I’m hopeful that it will happen tomorrow. Like President Biden, I’m keeping my fingers crossed,” Regev said.

Asked how confident he was that this will be the beginning of at least 50 Israeli hostages coming home, Regev said: “That’s the understanding reached. And that’s what we’re hoping for. Though it’s bittersweet, because if we get 50 home, there’s still 190 in Hamas captivity being held hostage and, of course, we want them all home.”

When pressed on whether he had confidence the deal would ultimately work, Regev said, “I don’t have a lot of confidence.”

“But because Hamas has been under military pressure, we’ve been hitting their machine, we’ve been hitting their commanders, we’ve been eliminating their top military commanders, they’re under pressure. They want this time-out,” he said, adding that such a truce was a “calculated risk.”

CNN/YL