Tag: Handed

Emma Graham-Harrison

Reporting from Tel Aviv:

US president Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, has just visited Hostage Square as the crowd waited for confirmation that Gadi Moses had been handed to the Red Cross.

Several, when they realised who was there, raced to pay personal tribute to Witkoff. “Thank you for freeing the hostages, thank you to Mr Trump,” one shouted.

Witkoff went for a meeting in a public library beyond, where the families of hostages have a room they use for meetings – but there is no confirmation he met any of them.

He had earlier met the four female soldiers freed on Saturday. He’s now left in a convoy.

The Israeli army says the Red Cross has confirmed that it has seven hostages – two Israelis and five Thai nationals.

More details soon …

Zakaria Zubeidi, a former leader of a Palestinian militant group jailed for attacks that killed several Israelis, will be released on Thursday as part of the Gaza ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas, reports Agence France-Presse (AFP).

Zubeidi, 49, rose to prominence during the second intifada, a Palestinian uprising in the early 2000s, becoming one of the most well-known militant leaders in Jenin and its refugee camp in the occupied West Bank.

It was during the uprising that Zubeidi’s mother was shot and killed when the Israeli army raided the camp, reports AFP.

He is known by Israeli security services as the man behind several deadly, high-profile attacks against Israelis.

Israeli hostage Arbel Yehud has been handed over to the Red Cross, Israel’s Channel 12 said, as footage showed her surrounded by a surging crowd and armed Palestinian militants in a chaotic scene in southern Gaza on Thursday.

Peter Beaumont

International staff working for the UN’s main agency serving Palestinians have been forced to leave Israel, after its ban on the agency came into effect.

As the UN flag was still flying above the headquarters building in Jerusalem, Palestinian staff were not present at the site over security concerns amid a planned “celebration” by Israeli rightwing groups outside the compound.

While Unrwa said on Thursday that it would continue working in Gaza and the West Bank for as long as possible, it added it had received no communications from Israel on how the ban would be implemented – most crucially over the delivery of aid to Gaza.

The Israeli ban went ahead on Thursday after the country’s supreme court rejected a petition by Palestinian human rights group Adalah contesting the new law prohibiting Unrwa.

The court did note that the legislation “prohibits Unrwa activity only on the sovereign territory of the state of Israel”, but did not prohibit such activity in Gaza and the West Bank.

The ban does apply, however, to Israeli-annexed East Jerusalem, where Unrwa has a field headquarters for its operations in the West Bank.

About 25 international staff left Israel on Wednesday after Israel had refused to issue visas or extend existing ones. International staff make up about 2% of the agency’s workforce.

“The headquarters is still there, and flag is still up,” said Juliette Touma, an Unrwa spokesperson.

“It’s a UN compound which means it must be protected. We don’t have plans to close our operations,” she said, adding that their work in the West Bank and Gaza was continuing.

“But we are in the dark. We have not received any instructions from Israel how the ban will be enforced beyond being told to vacate.”

In a statement on Thursday morning, the Spanish foreign ministry called for Israel to drop its ban on Unrwa, saying the move risked endangering both lives and the ceasefire.

“The government rejects the entry into force of the Knesset laws that prevent Unrwa operations in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and calls for their application to be suspended,” it said.

It added:

Spain expresses its deepest concern about the impact that this decision will have on the humanitarian situation in Gaza and the rest of the Occupied Palestinian Territories, jeopardising the ceasefire that began on January 19.

Unrwa is essential and irreplaceable for the lives of the 6 million refugees to whom it provides essential services, and for regional stability, and Spain firmly supports its work.”

Spain’s socialist-led government has been one of the most outspoken European critics of Israel’s actions in Gaza.

In November 2023, the Israeli government recalled its ambassador in Madrid and said it would be reprimanding Spain’s top diplomat in Tel Aviv after the prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, said he had “genuine doubts” about whether Israel was complying with international humanitarian law in its offensive in Gaza.

At the end of May last year, Spain joined Ireland and Norway in officially recognising a Palestinian state.

Rebecca Ratcliffe

At Wiwwaeo Sriaoun’s home in Udon Thani, north-east Thailand, everyone is anxiously following the news on their phones. Wiwwaeo’s son Watchara, 33, was one of dozens of Thai migrant workers kidnapped from the farms on which they were working in southern Israel on 7 October 2023.

Five of the six Thais still being held hostage are due to be released on Thursday. However their names are yet to be confirmed.

“I’m with [Watchara’s] aunt and other relatives, including my grandchild. All of us are just waiting for good news and praying that Watchara and his friends will come back,” said Wiwwaeo.

She was told by the Royal Thai embassy in Israel that she will get a call when names of the Thai hostages to be released are confirmed. “I’m hoping that one of them will be my son,” she said.

Watchara’s daughter, Irada, who is nine, had just arrived home from school, she said. She was hoping for good news. Neighbours had sent messages of support.

Watchara moved to work in Israel three years ago with his younger brother, hoping to save up money and pay off the family’s debts. Israel has been a common destination for Thai migrant workers as the salaries there are much higher than those offered back home. Most work in farming jobs.

Since the 7 October attacks, the Israeli government said they made up the largest single group of foreign dead and missing. In 2023, 23 Thais were released following diplomatic efforts that involved neighbouring Malaysia – which has ties with Hamas, having hosted its leaders in the past – as well as Qatar, Israel, Egypt, Iran and the International Committee of the Red Cross. In total, 46 Thais have been killed.

Emma Graham-Harrison

Reporting from Tel Aviv:

A crowd gathered from early morning in Tel Aviv’s Hostage Square, many carrying placards with the faces of the three Israelis due for release on Thursday.

They cheered as live footage from Gaza showed soldier Agam Berger, 19, the first to be handed over, alive and walking independently, surrounded by Hamas fighters.

“She made it,” said Yahel Oren, 31, watching the large screen in tears. “Its hard to think of her alone there, but at least we can count the minutes she has left.”

Oren served a decade ago at the Nahal Oz base where Berger was captured. Part of a group campaigning for the freedom of the female ‘spotter’ troops held in Gaza, she was wearing a T-shirt saying “once a spotter always a spotter”.

There were cheers again after Berger, the last female soldier held in Gaza, was handed to the Red Cross in the north of the strip.

Two civilian hostages, Arbel Yehoud 29, and Gadi Moses, 80, were expected to be released later in the morning in southern Gaza.

By late morning the crowd was hundreds strong, with schoolchildren and parents pushing babies, beside veterans of the long campaign to “bring them home”. Some had taken the day off, to join the crowd for a rare moment of joy after more than a year of anguish.

One waved a Thai flag, for five Thai nationals also due for release on Thursday. They have not yet been named.

Ruth Michaelson

Ruth Michaelson and Obaida Hamad in Suwayda:

Suwayda is well equipped for protests. The central square of the city, home to one of Syria’s larger minority communities, hosts the crowds of weekly – or sometimes even daily – demonstrators calling for the representation and public services they have demanded for years.

Long before the fall last month of the regime of Bashar al-Assad, the southern province of the same name had become a byword for resistance to rule by Damascus, unafraid to protest despite Assad’s crackdown on dissent and his hollow pledges to protect communities like theirs.

The area is overwhelmingly filled with members of the Druze sect, who follow an esoteric form of Islam whose adherents span a swath of Lebanon and Syria, including the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. Even before Assad fled last month as an insurgency reached Damascus, residents of Suwayda had been demanding a secular state that enshrined minority rights, and are now emphatically insisting their voices be heard in the new Syria.

“Since last August until now we’ve been protesting daily,” said Alia Kuntar, a lawyer, after the weekly demonstration held in Suwayda City’s central square in front of a metal pavilion emblazoned with the words “Peace to all Syrians”. “And we will keep protesting until we get the state we want. We haven’t felt any crackdown from the new government, but equally we didn’t see any action on the ground in response to our demands.”

She added: “Of course, we’ll increase our demonstrations until we get what we want.”

Protests in Suwayda began in August 2023 for increased public services and quickly spilled into demands for Assad to go, in a place that his regime had long ignored. The southern province was a rare pocket of resistance for well over a year before his rule collapsed amid a wider insurgency at the end of 2024. It now presents a challenge for Syria’s caretaker government, which is led by the Islamists who toppled Assad.

The other two Israelis expected to be released today are Arbel Yehoud, 29, and Gadi Moses, an 80-year-old man. There has been no official confirmation of the identities of the Thai nationals who will be released, reports the Associated Press (AP).

Israel said Yehoud was supposed to have been freed Saturday and delayed the opening of crossings to northern Gaza when she was not.

A number of foreign workers were taken captive along with dozens of Israeli civilians and soldiers during Hamas’s 7 0ctober 2023 attack. Twenty-three Thais were among more than 100 hostages released during a weeklong ceasefire in November 2023. Israel says eight Thais remain in captivity, two of whom are believed to be dead.

According to the AP, of the people expected to be released from prisons in Israel, 30 are serving life sentences after being convicted of deadly attacks against Israelis. Zakaria Zubeidi, a prominent former militant leader and theater director who took part in a dramatic jailbreak in 2021 before being rearrested days later, is also among those to be released.

The United States, Egypt and Qatar, which brokered the ceasefire after a year of tough negotiations, resolved the dispute with an agreement that Yehoud would be released on Thursday. Another three hostages, all men, are expected to be freed on Saturday along with dozens more Palestinian prisoners.