Hamas released six Israeli hostages on Saturday, but Israel delayed the handover of more than 600 Palestinians it was due to free from its prisons in exchange, putting the five-week-old ceasefire agreement once more in jeopardy.
The government said the release would be delayed until after a scheduled meeting of the security cabinet on Saturday evening at the earliest.
The delay imposes further strain on the precarious truce, which is at a particularly vulnerable moment, between first and second phases. The first phase is due to end next Saturday, but negotiations on the second phase have yet to begin.
Hamas spokesperson, Abdel Latif al-Qanou, issued a statement accusing Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, of “procrastination and stalling tactics”.
“The [Israeli] occupation’s failure to comply with the release of the seventh batch of prisoners in the exchange deal at the agreed-upon time constitutes a blatant violation of the agreement,” al-Qanou said.
While a majority of Israelis want the release of the remaining hostages to be the government’s priority, there is resistance from the right wing of Netanyahu’s governing coalition, which wants the war to resume with the aim of obliterating Hamas.
The hostages released by Hamas on Saturday included an Ethiopian-born Israeli and a Bedouin man, both with a history of mental illness, who had both been held captive for a decade after they wandered into Gaza on foot.
Avera Mengistu, aged 39, crossed a barbed wire fence on the Gaza beach in September 2014.
“Our family has endured 10 years and five months of unimaginable suffering. During this time, there have been continuous efforts to secure his return, with prayers and pleas, some silent, that remained unanswered until today,” Mengistu’s family said in a statement.
Hisham al-Sayed, 36, a Bedouin from the Negev desert, walked into Gaza from the east in April 2015 and was detained by Hamas.
“Why were they holding someone like that who did nothing wrong? He’s a man of peace, a man who wanted to reach Gaza. He loves Gaza, he did not go there as an aggressor,” Sayed’s father, Shaaban, told Israeli public radio earlier in the week. “This was more painful for us than everything else.”
Five of the hostages released on Saturday were handed over in ceremonies that Hamas has used for propaganda and that have been condemned as cruel and disrespectful by the Red Cross.
In one ceremony, Omer Wenkert, Omer Shem Tov and Eliya Cohen were posed alongside armed and masked Hamas fighters in front a large propaganda poster. An overjoyed Shem Tov kissed two militants on the head and blew kisses to the crowd assembled to watch the release.
Under the terms of a ceasefire deal, Israel was supposed to free 602 Palestinians from its prisons, of which 445 had been captured in the Gaza Strip since the outbreak of the war. They were due to be released inside Gaza. Of the remaining 157 Palestinians freed, some were due to be deported while others were transferred to the West Bank. Of them, 50 had been serving life sentences.
The head of the Israeli prison service, Kobi Yakobi, has sought to use the exchanges to make political points. Palestinians freed in an exchange the previous week had been made to wear T-shirts with an Arabic inscription: “We will not forget and we will not forgive”.
On Saturday, Yakobi prepared sweatshirts for the Palestinians being handed over that said: “I will pursue my enemies and overtake them, and I will not return until they are destroyed”, as well as bracelets inscribed: “The eternal people do not forget. I will pursue my enemies and overtake them.”
The release of six Israelis yesterday brought to 25 the number of hostages freed by Hamas in the first phase of the ceasefire. They also handed over four bodies of hostages who had been killed during the conflict, and are due to hand over four more in the coming week.
Among the bodies handed over on Thursday were those of two small boys from the same family, Ariel Bibas, 4, and his brother Kfir, nine months old, who were kidnapped in the surprise Hamas attack on Israel’s western Negev region on 7 October 2023. The remains of their mother, Shiri Bibas, were also handed over, but only after the body of another woman, presumed to be a Palestinian, was transferred. Hamas claimed it was a mistake but it caused outrage in Israel.
The US special envoy, Steve Witkoff, has encouraged the parties to move forward to a second phase, which would involve the release of the remaining 60 or so hostages (at least half of whom are believed by Israeli authorities to be dead), as well as hundreds more Palestinian prisoners and detainees, and the complete Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.
President Donald Trump has however continued to offer Netanyahu support should he choose to go back to war, pointing to the incident involving Bibas’s body.
“He is not torn. He wants to go in,” Trump told Fox News Radio on Friday. “He is just so angry at what happened yesterday and he should be.”