Residents and a medical worker in Gaza said that they had heard no new fighting or military strikes since about half an hour before it was finally implemented.
Israel blamed Hamas for the delay after the Palestinian militant group failed to provide a list naming the first three
to be released under the deal.
A Palestinian official familiar with the matter, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the delay occurred because mediators had asked for 48 hours of “calm” before the ceasefire’s implementation, but continued Israeli strikes right up until the deadline had made it difficult to send the list.
Israel did not immediately confirm the names.
Israel’s response has reduced much of Gaza to rubble and killed nearly 47,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza-based health authorities.
HOSTAGE LIST, LAST-MINUTE ATTACKS
Israeli military spokespeople said in separate statements on Sunday that their aircraft and artillery had attacked “
“ in northern and central Gaza, and that the military would continue to attack the strip as long as Hamas did not meet its
under the ceasefire.
An air raid siren that sounded in the Sderot area of southern Irael had been a false alarm, the Israeli military said in a separate statement.
The three-stage ceasefire agreement followed months of on-off negotiations brokered by Egypt, Qatar and the United States, and came just ahead of the Jan. 20 inauguration of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump.
They include 737 male, female and teen-aged prisoners, some of whom are members of militant groups convicted of attacks that killed dozens of Israelis, as well as hundreds of Palestinians from Gaza in detention since the start of the war.
Under the terms of the deal, Hamas will inform the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) where the meeting point will be inside Gaza and the ICRC is expected to begin driving to that location to collect the hostages, an official involved in the process told Reuters.
U.S. President Joe Biden’s team worked closely with Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff to push the deal over the line.
But what will come next in Gaza remains unclear in the absence of a comprehensive agreement on the postwar future of the enclave, which will require billions of dollars and years of work to rebuild.
Hamas, which has controlled Gaza for almost two decades, has survived despite losing its top leadership and thousands of fighters.
In Israel, the return of the hostages may ease some of the public anger against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-wing government over the Oct. 7 security failure that led to the deadliest single day in the country’s history.
The war sent shockwaves across the region, triggering a conflict with the Tehran-backed Lebanese Hezbollah movement and bringing Israel into direct conflict with its arch-foe Iran for the first time.
Hezbollah, whose huge missile arsenal was once seen as the biggest threat to Israel, has seen its its top leadership killed and most of its missiles and military infrastructure destroyed.
Netanyahu faces an International Criminal Court arrest warrant on war crimes allegations and separate accusations of genocide at the International Court of Justice.
Israel has reacted with fury to both cases, rejecting the charges as politically motivated and accusing South Africa, which brought the original ICJ case as well as the countries that have joined it, of antisemitism.
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