new exchange of Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners this Saturday – L’Express

⇒ Fourteen new hostages held in the Gaza Strip will be released this Saturday, November 25 as part of the agreement between Israel and the terrorist group Hamas.

⇒ In exchange, forty-two Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli prisons will be released.

⇒ The four-day humanitarian truce continues in Gaza, providing respite for civilians and displaced people who are trying to return to their homes.

New releases of Hamas hostages and Palestinian prisoners are expected this Saturday, November 25, on the second day of the truce between the Islamist movement and Israel which offers a fragile respite to the inhabitants of Gaza after seven weeks of war. Israeli authorities announced that 14 hostages and 42 Palestinian prisoners were to be released today.

This four-day, renewable truce, obtained on Wednesday by Qatar with the support of the United States and Egypt, provides for the release of a total of 50 hostages held in the Gaza Strip and 150 Palestinians detained in Israeli prisons. .

A two-minute video released by Hamas on Friday showed masked fighters, armed with rifles, wearing military fatigues and the green headband of the movement’s armed wing, handing over the first hostages to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). The 24 hostages released on Friday (13 Israelis, ten Thais and one Filipino) then arrived in Israel via Egypt. Israel, for its part, released 39 Palestinians detained in its prisons.

In the occupied West Bank, scenes of jubilation, amid fireworks, Palestinian flags and various movements including the green banner of Hamas, accompanied the return of Palestinian prisoners released by Israel, as in Beitunia or further north , in the Nablus refugee camp. In East Jerusalem, occupied by Israel since 1967, any celebration has, however, been banned.

“We are aware of reports that a Shahed 136 (Bien Shahed) type drone reached a ship in the Indian Ocean” on Friday, a US military official told AFP, adding that the boat suffered damage. damage but there were no injuries on board. The attack comes after threats from Yemeni Houthi rebels, who are backed by Iran, against Israeli and Israeli-allied ships sailing in the Red Sea.

According to a maritime source, the attacked boat is a “Maltese-flagged container ship” and the vessel is operated by “a company affiliated with Israel […] which would explain why it was targeted.” Still according to this source, before the attack, transmissions allowing the location of this ship had been interrupted shortly after its departure from the port of Jebel Ali, part of Dubai in the Gulf .

“It’s just the beginning, but so far it’s going well,” US President Joe Biden said on Friday, adding that there was a “real chance” of extending the truce. The Israeli army estimates that around 240 people were kidnapped by Hamas during the bloody attack carried out by Islamist commandos in Israeli territory on October 7. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who makes the release of the hostages a prerequisite for any ceasefire, said on Friday he was determined to bring them all back to Israel.

“There are approximately 215 hostages remaining in Gaza,” Israeli army spokesman Doron Spielman said. “We don’t know, in many cases, whether they are dead or alive,” he added. Before the 24 hostages released Friday, Hamas had already released four people, and the Israeli army had recovered another. Two other captives, including a female soldier, were found dead in Gaza by Israeli troops. Among the remaining hostages are 20 Thai nationals, the Thai Foreign Ministry said on Saturday.

In Tel Aviv, smiling faces of freed hostages were projected Friday evening on the facade of the Art Museum, with the words: “I’m back home.” Near Schneider Children’s Hospital in the Tel Aviv suburb of Petah Tikva, people cheered and waved Israeli flags as the two helicopters carrying freed hostages approached.

“I am happy to have found my family. Feeling joy is allowed and it is allowed to shed a tear. It’s human,” declares Yoni Asher, who has just found his wife Doron and his two daughters aged two and four years, in a video broadcast by the Hostage Families Forum. “But I’m not partying, I won’t party until the last hostages come home,” he adds.

The spokesperson for the Schneider hospital indicated this Saturday that the four children and four women ex-hostages who were admitted there were with their families, “surrounded by medical and psychosocial teams”, and that their condition is ” Good”. The five other released hostages, elderly women, are at Wolfson Hospital in Holon, near Tel Aviv, “in stable condition” and are receiving appropriate care, also surrounded by their families, according to the spokesperson of the establishment.

The truce offers a fragile moment of respite to Gazans. The din of war gave way to the horns of traffic jams and the sirens of ambulances trying to make their way among the displaced, leaving hospitals and schools where they had found refuge in droves to “return home”. More than half of the territory’s housing has been damaged or destroyed, according to the UN, and 1.7 million people have been displaced, out of the 2.4 million in the Gaza Strip.

“The truce feels good, we hope it will last. It’s good when it’s calm. People want to live,” Mohammed Dheir, who found refuge with his family in Rafah, told AFP , in the south of the Gaza Strip. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from the north have massed in this part of the territory since the start of the war to try to escape the war.

The army considers the northern third of the Gaza Strip, where Gaza City is located, to be a combat zone housing the center of Hamas’s infrastructure and has ordered all civilians out. Leaflets launched from the air on Friday by the Israeli army warned: “the war is not yet over”, “returning to the North is prohibited and very dangerous!!!”

According to the United Nations agency responsible for humanitarian coordination (Ocha), at least one person was killed and several dozen injured in incidents with Israeli forces, who opened fire and threw tear gas at Palestinians heading north.

The truce must also allow the entry of a greater number of humanitarian aid convoys into the Gaza Strip, subject to an Israeli blockade since 2007 and in a state of “complete siege” since October 9, Israel having cut the supply of water, food, electricity, medicine and fuel.

On Friday, 200 trucks loaded with aid entered Gaza, according to the Israeli Defense Ministry’s department responsible for civil affairs in Gaza. This is the “largest humanitarian convoy” since the start of the war, OCHA stressed.