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Families await the release of hostages as Palestinians return to ‘ghost town’ during Gaza ceasefire
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Families await the release of hostages as Palestinians return to ‘ghost town’ during Gaza ceasefire

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The ceasefire in the Gaza Strip remained in place for a second day as tens of thousands of Palestinians returned to their neighborhoods and Israelis welcomed the expected release of the remaining hostages.
Israelis cheered US President Donald Trump, and some booed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as US Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner addressed a weekly meeting in Tel Aviv organized by the families of the remaining hostages.

“To the hostages themselves, our brothers and sisters: you are coming home,” Witkoff told the crowd, estimated at hundreds of thousands, who shouted, “Thank you Trump.”

Einav Zangauker, whose son Matan is one of about 20 hostages believed to be alive, said: “We will keep shouting and fighting until everyone gets home.”

“We finally feel hope, but we cannot and do not want to stop now,” added Zairo Shachar Mohr Munder, whose uncle Abraham was kidnapped during the October 7 Hamas attack and his body was recovered in August.

When will the hostages be released?

Hamas will begin releasing Israeli hostages held in Gaza on Monday morning local time, a top official of the militant group told Agence France-Presse, before Trump chairs an international summit in Egypt. about his peace plan for the region.

“According to the signed agreement, the prisoner exchange will begin on Monday morning as agreed,” Hamas official Osama Hamdan told AFP in an interview.

As part of the first phase of the deal, Hamas will hand over the 47 remaining hostages – living and dead – of the 251 kidnapped in the October 7 attack two years ago, in exchange for nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners.
It is expected that the remains of another hostage, held in Gaza since 2014, will also be returned.

Israel will release about 250 Palestinians serving prison sentences, as well as about 1,700 people arrested from the Gaza Strip in the past two years and held without charge.

“Shall we live in a tent for twenty years?”

More than 500,000 Palestinians had returned to Gaza City by Sunday AEST, according to the Gaza Civil Protection Organization.
For many Gazans, the journey back through the wasteland of the enclave led to homes in ruins.
“My house, which I built 40 years ago, disappeared in an instant,” said Ahmed al-Jabari, standing in the rubble of a street in Gaza City. “I’m glad there’s no blood, no murder (but) where are we going? Are we going to live in a tent for twenty years?”

Drone footage taken by AFP showed entire city blocks reduced to a twisted mess of concrete and steel wire.

Many Gazans returned to their homes, which were reduced to rubble. Source: AFP / -/AFP

“We walked for hours and every step was filled with fear and anxiety for my house,” Raja Salmi, 52, told AFP.

When she reached the Al-Rimal neighborhood, she found her house completely destroyed.

“I stood in front of it and cried. All those memories are just dust now,” she said.

The walls and windows of five-story apartment buildings had been torn off and now lay suffocating along the roadsides as disconsolate residents poked through the rubble, searching for homes among collapsed concrete slabs, wrecked vehicles and rubble.
“It felt like a ghost town, not like Gaza,” says Sami Musa (28). “The smell of death still hangs in the air.”

At least 67,682 people have been killed in Israel’s campaign in Gaza, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health.

Trump’s peace summit

Trump and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi will then chair a summit of more than twenty countries on Monday afternoon local time in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, the Egyptian presidency announced.
The meeting will aim to “end the war in the Gaza Strip, enhance efforts to achieve peace and stability in the Middle East, and usher in a new era of regional security and stability,” the report said.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has said he will attend, as will British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, his counterparts from Italy and Spain, Giorgia Meloni and Pedro Sánchez Pérez-Castejón, and French President Emmanuel Macron.

There was no immediate word on whether Netanyahu will attend, while Hamas said it would not participate because it had acted “mainly through Qatari and Egyptian mediators” during the talks, said Hossam Badran, a member of Hamas’s political bureau.
Despite the apparent breakthrough, the mediators still face the daunting task of securing a longer-term political solution in which Hamas will surrender its weapons and relinquish control of Gaza.
Badran said the second phase of Trump’s plan “contains many complexities and difficulties,” while a Hamas official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said disarmament was “out of the question.”
Under the Trump plan, as Israel carries out a phased withdrawal from Gaza’s cities, it will be replaced by a multinational force from Egypt, Qatar, Türkiye and the United Arab Emirates, coordinated by a US-led command center in Israel.

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