3 civilian women said set to be freed on truce's first day

Gaza ceasefire-hostage deal on brink of finalization, as reports spell out details

Conflicting news on whether Hamas has okayed mediators’ draft; IDF reportedly to immediately leave Netzarim Corridor, with Qatar, Egypt monitoring Gazans heading north using X-ray

Pictures in Jerusalem of Israelis held hostage by Hamas terrorists in Gaza, January 13, 2025. (Chaim Goldberg/ Flash90)
Pictures in Jerusalem of Israelis held hostage by Hamas terrorists in Gaza, January 13, 2025. (Chaim Goldberg/ Flash90)

Talks for a Gaza ceasefire and hostage exchange deal between Israel and Hamas continued in earnest Tuesday, with officials from both sides and from mediating countries estimating that a landmark agreement to end the 15-month war was near-finalized, with multiple outlets reporting details of its content.

Key mediator Qatar said Tuesday that a day earlier it had presented both parties with a “final” draft of the agreement. Israel’s Channel 12 news reported Monday that Jerusalem considered it broadly acceptable, and senior Israeli officials said they were waiting for Hamas’s reaction.

The Associated Press reported Tuesday that Hamas accepted the deal as well, citing two officials involved in the talks. However, CNN later cited an Egyptian official as saying the mediating countries — Qatar, Egypt, and the United States — had not yet received a response from the Palestinian terror group.

Hamas did say the ongoing negotiations had reached their “final stage” and that it had held consultations with other Palestinian factions and informed them of the “progress made.”

Some of the hostages are being held by other terror groups in Gaza, such as the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which announced on Tuesday evening that it had sent a delegation to Doha to participate in talks regarding the final details of the deal.

Saudi outlet Al-Hadath reported Tuesday evening that Hamas had started dividing the hostages into groups, ahead of their expected release.

Qatar said the sides were at the “closest point” yet to sealing a deal.

Qatar’s foreign ministry said it believed the talks were “at the final stages,” expressing hope that a deal was imminent, but cautioning that “until there is an announcement… we shouldn’t be over-excited about what’s happening right now.”

Foreign Ministry spokesman Majed al-Ansari told a news conference that most obstacles had been overcome, but did not go into detail.

A Palestinian source close to the talks was cited by Reuters as expecting the deal to be finalized on Tuesday, if “all goes well.”

Palestinians inspect damaged tents for displaced people following an Israeli strike in Deir al Balah, Gaza Strip, on January 14, 2025. (Ali Hassan/Flash90)

Officials have expressed optimism before, only for negotiations to grind to a halt. However, they are now suggesting that they can conclude an agreement ahead of the January 20 inauguration of US President-elect Donald Trump, whose Middle East envoy has joined the negotiations.

Hamas and other Gazan terrorist factions are believed to be holding 98 hostages, including the bodies of at least 36 confirmed dead by Israel.

First phase

The three-phase agreement — based on a framework laid out by US President Joe Biden and endorsed by the UN Security Council — would begin with the gradual release of 33 hostages over a six-week period, including women, children, adults over the age of 50, and severely sick and wounded civilians.

Israel believes most of the 33 are alive but that some are dead.

In exchange, Israel would release many hundreds of Palestinian security prisoners. The BBC put the number at 1,000 prisoners, including approximately 190 terrorists who have been serving sentences of 15 years or more.

On Monday, Israeli diplomatic officials, briefing military and diplomatic reporters, said high-profile “murderer” terrorists would not be released to the West Bank under the deal, and nobody who took part in the October 7, 2023, Hamas onslaught would be freed. Unconfirmed reports have indicated that the “murderer” terrorists would not be allowed to return to the West Bank, but would instead go to Gaza, and possibly to Egypt, Turkey, or Qatar.

The Associated Press claimed it had obtained a copy of the proposed agreement, adding that an Egyptian official and a Hamas official had confirmed its authenticity.

Protesters call for the release of hostages held by Hamas in the Gaza Strip, outside the IDF’s Kirya headquarters in Tel Aviv, January 13, 2025. (Itai Ron/Flash90)

It said that among the first phase’s 33 hostages would be five female IDF soldiers, each of whom would be released in exchange for 50 Palestinian security prisoners, including 30 convicted terrorists who are serving life sentences.

During this first, 42-day phase, Israeli forces would withdraw from population centers, Palestinians would be allowed to start returning to their homes in northern Gaza, and there would be a surge of humanitarian aid, with some 600 trucks entering each day, according to AP.

The BBC reported, citing a Palestinian official, that the agreement would begin with the release of three of the Hamas-held hostages on the first day of the deal, following which the IDF would begin withdrawing from populated areas in Gaza.

Channel 12 reported, without citing a source, that these three first hostages would be civilian women, adding that each subsequent week would begin with the release of another group of abductees, starting with female civilian hostages, along with children Ariel Bibas, 5, and Kfir Bibas, nearly 2. Hamas claimed at the beginning of the war that they and their mother Shiri were killed in an Israeli airstrike. The IDF said it was probing the matter and has since said that it does not have intelligence confirming that they are no longer alive.

The next group to be released in the first phase, according to Channel 12, would be female soldiers, followed by the elderly and then those who are deemed severely ill.

A portrait of baby hostage Kfir Bibas created by graffiti artist Benzi Brofman (Courtesy)

Israel to retain Philadelphi Corridor, 800-meter border buffer zone

The deal would allow Israel throughout the first phase to remain in control of the Philadelphi Corridor, the band of territory along Gaza’s border with Egypt, which Hamas had initially demanded Israel withdraw from immediately.

Israel would pull out, however, from the Netzarim Corridor, a belt across central Gaza, where it had sought a mechanism for searching Palestinians for arms when they returned to the territory’s north.

A week into the truce, the BBC reported, Israel would begin allowing the return of displaced Gazans from the south to the north. The report said they would be allowed to travel up the coastal road on foot only. Cars, animal-drawn carts and trucks would be allowed to cross through a passage adjacent to Salah a-Din Road, monitored by an X-ray machine to be operated by a Qatari-Egyptian technical security team, the report said.

The Israeli diplomatic officials said Monday there would be unspecified “security arrangements” for Palestinian civilians in southern Gaza seeking to return to the Strip’s north.

The officials said Israel would not completely withdraw from Gaza until the war’s goals are achieved, among them the return of all the hostages.

The BBC report said that the IDF would also retain an 800-meter buffer zone along the Strip’s eastern and northern borders with Israel during the first phase.

A view of the Netzarim Corridor in the central Gaza Strip, December 26, 2024. (Emanuel Fabian/Times of Israel)

Later phases

In the second phase, Hamas would release the remaining living captives — non-wounded adult males under the age of 50, all of whom Hamas considers “soldiers” — in exchange for more security prisoners and the “complete withdrawal” of Israeli forces from Gaza, according to the draft agreement cited by AP.

Hamas has said it will not free the remaining hostages without an end to the war and a complete Israeli withdrawal, while Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has in the past vowed to resume fighting until Hamas’s military and governing capabilities are eliminated.

Unless an alternative government for Gaza is worked out in those talks, it could leave Hamas in charge of the territory.

In a third phase, the bodies of remaining hostages would be returned in exchange for a three- to five-year reconstruction plan to be carried out in Gaza under international supervision.

The exact details of the later phases must be negotiated during the first, starting on the 16th day of the ceasefire.

Those details remain difficult to resolve — and the deal does not include written guarantees that the ceasefire will continue until a deal is reached. That leaves the potential for Israel to resume its military campaign after the first phase ends.

Troops operating in Gaza’s Beit Hanoun, in an undated photo released by the military for publication on January 12, 2025. (Israel Defense Forces)

The three mediators have given Hamas verbal guarantees that negotiations will continue as planned and that they will press for a deal to implement the second and third phases before the end of the first, an Egyptian official told AP.

A senior Arab diplomat told The Times of Israel on Tuesday that the three-phased hostage deal currently being finalized between Israel and Hamas is largely the same as the proposal that was proposed by Israel last May.

“A deal could have been reached much earlier, but both sides led to talks falling apart at various times,” the diplomat familiar with the negotiations said.

The ongoing war was sparked by the October 7, 2023, onslaught, in which thousands of Hamas-led terrorists invaded Israel and murdered around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducted another 251, amid widely documented atrocities targeting civilians.

Hamas released 105 civilians during a weeklong truce in late November 2023, and four hostages were released before that. Eight hostages have been rescued by troops alive, and the bodies of 40 hostages have also been recovered, including three mistakenly killed by the military as they tried to escape their captors.

Hamas is also holding two Israeli civilians who entered the Strip in 2014 and 2015, as well as the bodies of two IDF soldiers who were killed in 2014.

The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry says more than 46,000 people in the Strip have been killed or are presumed dead in the fighting so far, though the toll cannot be verified and does not differentiate between civilians and fighters. Israel says it has killed some 18,000 combatants in battle as of November and another 1,000 terrorists inside Israel on October 7.

Israel has said it seeks to minimize civilian fatalities and stresses that Hamas uses Gaza’s civilians as human shields, fighting from civilian areas, including homes, hospitals, schools, and mosques.

Israel’s toll in the ground offensive against Hamas in Gaza and in military operations along the border with the Strip stands at 407.

Growing pressure ahead of Trump’s inauguration

Israel and Hamas have come under renewed pressure to halt the conflict in the lead-up to Trump’s inauguration next week. His Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, recently joined US, Egyptian, and Qatari mediators in the Gulf country’s capital, Doha.

US President-elect Donald Trump speaks as Steve Witkoff listens, during a news conference at Mar-a-Lago, January 7, 2025, in Palm Beach, Florida. (AP/ Evan Vucci)

Trump said late Monday that a ceasefire was “very close.”

“I understand… there’s been a handshake and they are getting it finished — and maybe by the end of the week,” he told the American cable channel Newsmax.

Netanyahu met Tuesday with two groups of hostages’ families at his office in Jerusalem.

The first meeting at the premier’s office lasted 45 minutes, with Netanyahu telling the families that talks are advancing and that he is doing everything he can to bring about the release of all 98 hostages, Channel 12 reported.

Netanyahu highlighted how Israel’s military successes over the past several months led Hamas to compromise on some of its positions.

Sharon Sharabi and other relatives of Israelis held hostage by terrorists in the Gaza Strip speak to the media after meeting with Pime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, outside the Prime Minister’s Office in Jerusalem, January 14, 2025. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

Several of those who were in the first meeting told Channel 12 that they left with lots of questions unanswered, particularly regarding when the second and third phases of the deal will commence.

Sharon Sharabi, whose brothers Yossi and Eli are held in Gaza, told reporters after the meeting that the government should not agree to wait until the 16th day to start negotiations on the terms of the second phase, arguing that these talks should commence right away. Yossi Sharabi was accidentally killed in an IDF strike, while Eli Sharabi is believed to be alive.

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