Hamas said on Thursday that it was ready to release Israeli hostages this weekend as laid out by the Gaza cease-fire agreement, after the fragile deal teetered this week, prompting more pessimism about its future.
Mahmoud Mardawi, a Hamas official, said in a text message that the hostage-for-prisoner exchange was set to go ahead on Saturday as long as Israel upheld its end of the agreement. He said mediators had told Hamas that Israel said it was committed to the deal..
Israel did not immediately comment on that and other statements by Hamas describing diplomatic progress. Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, was consulting with security chiefs in southern Israel on Thursday afternoon, his office said.
Egypt and Qatar, alongside the United States, have been brokering the cease-fire meant to end over a year of devastating war. During the first six weeks of the truce, Hamas agreed to release at least 33 hostages in exchange for more than 1,500 Palestinians imprisoned by Israel. At least 21 hostages and 766 Palestinian prisoners have been freed since the deal went into effect in late January.
But this week, Hamas announced that it would indefinitely suspend the next hostage release to protest what it described as Israeli violations of the truce’s terms. Mr. Netanyahu then threatened that unless hostages were released by noon Saturday, Israel would resume its military campaign “until Hamas is conclusively defeated.”
President Trump added a further complication by demanding that all the remaining hostages be freed by Saturday or “all hell is going to break out.” That message appeared to contradict the cease-fire deal that Mr. Trump’s own envoy had helped to broker, which stipulates a gradual release of hostages for Palestinian prisoners.
Mediators between the two sides were following up “to remove obstacles and close gaps” after recent “positive” talks with senior officials from Egypt and Qatar, Hamas said in a statement released earlier Thursday. Hamas has said that Israeli forces have repeatedly opened fire on Palestinians during the truce and not allowed prefabricated homes and heavy machinery to enter Gaza, in violation of the terms of the deal.
Omer Dostri, Mr. Netanyahu’s spokesman, said in a statement on Thursday that Israel was not allowing in prefabricated housing or heavy construction equipment, without explaining the rationale. He did not say whether that might change.
At least 60,000 prefabricated housing units and 200,000 tents should be delivered to Gaza during the first phase of the deal, in addition to equipment for rubble clearance, according to a copy of the agreement’s text seen by The New York Times. Hamas has complained that only a small number of the minimum of 200,000 tents has arrived in Gaza.
Three Israeli officials and two mediators, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter, said this week that Hamas’s claims about not receiving enough tents were accurate. But COGAT, the Israeli military unit that oversees aid deliveries, said in a written response that Hamas’s accusations were “completely false.”
Even if the current roadblocks are surmounted, however, the future of the truce and how long it would last are still far from certain. The first phase is set to expire in early March, and Israel and Hamas have yet to agree on terms to extend the agreement.
Israel and Hamas were supposed to begin indirect talks over the second phase of the deal last week, which would include an end to the war and the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza. But on Thursday, Mr. Dostri said Israel was “not currently conducting negotiations over the second phase of the deal.”
The war in Gaza began on Oct. 7, 2023, after Palestinian militants launched an attack on Israel in which about 1,200 people were killed and 250 taken hostage, mostly civilians. Israel’s campaign in Gaza has killed over 48,000 people in the Palestinian enclave, according to local health officials, who do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
Underscoring the fragility of the ongoing truce, a rocket was launched from Gaza before falling back into the enclave, the Israeli military said on Thursday. Hamas did not comment, but its projectiles have sometimes accidentally landed in Gaza, causing casualties. Israeli forces later struck the rocket launcher, the military said.
Despite the standoff, the fragile cease-fire was still holding and some tents and other humanitarian aid have been entering Gaza. The United Nations’ relief agency said in a statement on Wednesday that 801 trucks entered Gaza that day to “seize every opportunity afforded by the cease-fire to scale up” assistance.
But the emergency coordinator in Gaza for the aid agency Doctors Without Borders warned that humanitarian deliveries were not happening quickly enough and that “people are still lacking basic items.”
“We are still not seeing the massive scale-up of humanitarian aid needed in northern Gaza,” the emergency coordinator, Caroline Seguin, wrote in a dispatch from the territory that was posted online on Wednesday.
Mr. Trump’s recent ideas for the future of the Middle East have reverberated around the region. Over the past week, he has repeatedly said that the United States should take over Gaza, turn it into the “Riviera of the Middle East” and not allow displaced Palestinians to return to the territory once it has been rebuilt.
Palestinians, other Arabs and many experts in the field have rejected Mr. Trump’s proposal as ethnic cleansing. Any such move to empty Gaza would most likely preclude any future chance of a Palestinian state there.
Rawan Sheikh Ahmad contributed reporting.
