The office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has told reporters that “in light of developments on the issue of the release of our hostages,” he will convene Israel’s war cabinet, its security cabinet and the government Tuesday evening Israel time.
Any deal would come after weeks of complicated negotiations. Neither Israel nor the United States speaks directly to Hamas, which has been represented in negotiations by Qatar.
“We are now very close, very close. We could bring some of these hostages home very soon,” President Biden said at a White House event Tuesday.
Here’s what to expect:
There would be a temporary pause in fighting
The Washington Post reported last week that negotiators had compiled a six-page document outlining the procedure for getting hostages safely out of Gaza. It states that under the deal, combat operations would stop temporarily, and a substantial increase in humanitarian assistance would be allowed into Gaza.
The exact length of the pause in fighting is currently uncertain, as are some of the precise parameters of what fighting would be prohibited during the period. Negotiators had called for a five-day pause, though Israel had pushed back against the length of the pause and emphasized that the fighting would continue after the window, with no withdrawal of troops.
“We’re talking about a pause in the fighting for a few days,” Michael Herzog, Israel’s ambassador to Washington, said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.”
Large numbers of hostages would be released
Israeli officials have said that 239 hostages were taken by Palestinian groups in the Hamas-led attacks Oct. 7. Israel has said that these hostages are mostly being held in a network of tunnels underneath Gaza, complicating efforts to fight Hamas.
Under the deal, Hamas would initially release 50 or more hostages, focusing on women and children, according to The Post’s reporting. More hostages could then be released in smaller batches as the deal progresses.
The hope is that if the template for the release of hostages works, it could be used to release more hostages in future deals, with Palestinian prisoners held in Israel also released.
Before this deal, only four hostages had been freed by Hamas since the conflict began, including an American mother and daughter. During the operation to free those U.S. citizens, Israel stopped firing on a specific area of Gaza for several hours, and the International Committee of the Red Cross took custody of the hostages and brought them across the border to Israel.
It would be a pause, not a cease-fire
More than 100 countries have called for a full cease-fire, with the term becoming a rallying cry for critics of the Israel-Gaza war. U.N. Secretary General António Guterres has repeatedly called for “a humanitarian cease-fire.”
However, the expected deal has been described not as a cease-fire but as a temporary pause, as proposed by Israeli officials and the United States.
Though neither term has a set meaning under international law, Israel and the United States have emphasized that the difference is that a pause has a more limited scope and a set time limit, while a cease-fire is aimed toward reaching a long-term secession of hostilities.
While Hamas official Izzat al-Rishq said in a statement early Tuesday that the “truce” deal was imminent, Israeli and U.S. officials have not used that term, with the expectation that hostilities would pause rather than cease.
There could be other potential problems
Depending on the outline of the deal, it may require both political and legal approval in Israel, a process that could slow and complicate its implementation.
Hamas has also indicated that it does not have full control of all of the hostages held in Gaza, with smaller militant groups such as Palestinian Islamic Jihad potentially in control of some hostages, and claimed that some of those held captive have been killed in Israeli airstrikes.