Hamas submitted, this Friday, January 24, the list of four hostages who must be released on Saturday, the second series of releases under the truce agreement with Israel: the Islamist movement refers to four Israeli “soldiers”.
“As part of the prisoner exchange, the (Ezzedine) al-Qassam Brigades decided to release (Saturday) four female soldiers,” Abou Obeida, spokesperson for the armed wing of Hamas, said on Telegram on Friday. The office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu immediately confirmed having received, via the mediators, a “list of hostages” who could be released without further details.
Six weeks of truce
The first phase of the truce, which is to last six weeks and began last Sunday, is supposed to allow the release of 33 hostages held in Gaza against a much larger number of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel. Three young women have already been released. There will therefore still be 26 hostages available for release on Saturday evening in this first phase.
According to the agreement, immediately after the release of these four new hostages, “people displaced in the south of the Gaza Strip will begin to return to the north”, specified Bassem Naïm, member of the Hamas political bureau based in Doha: “An Egyptian-Qatari committee will oversee the implementation of the agreement on the ground.”
A Palestinian source close to Hamas also described a process identical to that of last Sunday, as well as that of the hostages released during the previous truce, at the end of November 2023. “The Al-Qassam Brigades (armed branch of Hamas, Editor’s note ) and other resistance factions will release the four prisoners on Saturday, before the scheduled time” to hand them over to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), added this source.