(Gaza) Israel announced that displaced people from Gaza could begin to return to the north of the territory on Monday, after an agreement with the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas allowing the upcoming release of hostages, according to the office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Updated yesterday at 9:23 p.m.
Youssef HASSOUNA with Adel ZAANOUN in Caire and Didier LAURAS in Jérusalem
Agence France-Presse
This agreement makes it possible to preserve the fragile ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, devastated by 15 months of war and almost all of whose inhabitants have been displaced.
“Tens of thousands” of displaced people, according to Civil Defense, were prevented on Sunday by Israel from returning to northern Gaza via the Netzarim crossing, which cuts the territory in two.
Israel had justified its refusal to let them pass by the non-release of a civilian, Arbel Yehud, and the absence of a list on the situation of the hostages.
On Sunday evening, Mr. Netanyahu finally announced a release of the negotiations and that Hamas would release three hostages on Thursday including Arbel Yehud and, as planned by the first phase of the truce agreement between Israel and Hamas, three others on Saturday. “As part of these arrangements,” Israel “will allow from [lundi] morning the passage of Gazans towards the north of the Gaza Strip,” added the Prime Minister’s Office.
“We want to find our memories and the people who are dear to us,” Jihad Abou Miri told AFP, who said he had been waiting for 48 hours.
Hamas for its part accused Israel on Sunday of “violating” the agreement by preventing the return of residents of northern Gaza.
PHOTO JACK GUEZ, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE ARCHIVES
A protester carrying an Israeli flag walks past a banner bearing the portrait of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a demonstration calling for the release of hostages held in Gaza since the October 7, 2023 attack by Palestinian militants, in Tel Aviv , January 25, 2025.
“We will not leave Gaza”
Hamas, like Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, also criticized on Sunday Donald Trump’s proposal to move the inhabitants of Gaza to Egypt and Jordan in order, according to him, to “clean up” the territory.
The American president on Saturday compared the devastated Palestinian territory to a “demolition site”.
“We’re talking about 1.5 million people, and we’re just cleaning that up,” Mr. Trump said, suggesting a “temporary or long-term” move. “I would like Egypt to welcome people. And I would like Jordan to welcome people,” he added.
The vast majority of the Gaza Strip’s 2.4 million inhabitants have been displaced by the war within the besieged territory.
For Palestinians, any attempt to move outside their territory evokes memories of the “Nakba,” or “Catastrophe” in Arabic, the name given to the mass displacement that followed the creation of Israel in 1948.
PHOTO LEAH MILLIS, REUTERS
US President Donald Trump
“We declare to Trump and to the whole world: we will not leave Palestine or Gaza, no matter what happens,” displaced person from Gaza City, Rashad al-Naji, told AFP.
Palestinians will ‘derail’ Mr. Trump’s proposal ‘like they have derailed all displacement plans’ […] for decades,” responded Bassem Naïm, member of the Hamas political bureau, on Sunday.
Islamic Jihad, another armed Palestinian movement, said the comments encouraged “war crimes and crimes against humanity” in Gaza.
Rival of Hamas which ousted the Palestinian Authority and took power in Gaza in 2007, Mahmoud Abbas condemned “any project” aimed at displacing Gazans.
PHOTO MOHAMMED SALEM, REUTERS
Displaced Palestinians gather with their belongings near a roadblock as they wait to return to their homes in the northern part of the Gaza Strip, January 26, 2025
Jordan, which hosts around 2.3 million Palestinian refugees, like Egypt reaffirmed on Sunday any rejection of a “forced displacement” of Palestinians.
-The Arab League warned of “attempts to uproot Palestinians from their land,” which “could only be described as ethnic cleansing.”
Far-right Israeli Minister Bezalel Smotrich, for his part, described Donald Trump’s proposal as an “excellent idea”, saying that the Palestinians could “establish a new and beautiful life elsewhere”.
“Let them bring the children back”
The first phase of the ceasefire agreement concluded after 15 months of war must last six weeks and allow the release of a total of 33 hostages held in Gaza against some 1,900 Palestinian prisoners.
In the second exchange that occurred during this truce, which entered its second week, four Israeli soldiers were released on Saturday by the Islamist movement in exchange for around 200 Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails.
During this first phase, the modalities of the second must be negotiated, which should allow the release of the last hostages and the definitive end of the war, before the last stage relating to the reconstruction of Gaza and the restitution of the bodies of the hostages who died in captivity.
The war was triggered by the attack carried out on October 7, 2023 by Hamas against Israel, which resulted in the death of 1,210 people on the Israeli side, the majority civilians, according to an AFP count based on official Israeli data. .
PHOTO BILAL HUSSEIN, ASSOCIATED PRESS
Lebanese citizens observe the damage caused to their village by the Israeli air and ground offensive, in Aita al-Shaab, a Lebanese village bordering Israel, in southern Lebanon, January 26, 2025
Of 251 people kidnapped during the attack, 87 are still hostages in Gaza, of whom 34 have died according to the army.
The offensive launched in retaliation by Israel in the Gaza Strip left at least 47,306 dead, the majority civilians, according to data from the Hamas government’s Ministry of Health, deemed reliable by the UN.
In Israel, relatives of hostages kidnapped on October 7, 2023 but not on the list of those to be released as a priority expressed their anger to AFP on Sunday.
“We want the deal to continue and for them to bring the children back as quickly as possible and all at once,” said Dani Miran, a 79-year-old whose son Omri is hostage in Gaza.
PHOTO MOHAMMED SALEM, REUTERS
Palestinian children, displaced by Israeli orders to southern Gaza during the war, warm themselves by the fire as they wait to be allowed to return to their homes in northern Gaza.
A “threat to Jordan”, according to analysts
US President Donald Trump’s proposal to send Palestinians from Gaza to Egypt and Jordan is “hostile”, threatens the “security” of Washington’s two allies and aims to “liquidate the Palestinian cause”, say Jordanian analysts .
“It is a hostile position of the new American administration towards the Palestinians first, then towards Jordan and Egypt,” Oraib Rantawi, director of the Al-Quds Center for Political Studies in Jerusalem, told AFP. Amman, seeing it as “a threat to the security and stability” of Israel’s two neighboring countries.
Mr. Rantawi believes that this is a “message of pressure to Amman” and a “poisoned chalice” for Cairo. According to him, such a plan would be a step towards a broader movement of Palestinians, particularly from the occupied West Bank, towards Jordan, and would aim to “liquidate the Palestinian cause at the expense of Arab countries.”
The Jordanian writer and political analyst Adel Mahmoud, for his part, describes the American president’s proposal as “unrealistic”, made “under humanitarian cover”, seeing it as a reflection of “the position of the Israeli extreme right”. However, “Jordan and Egypt will not accept it”.
Mr. Rantawi recalls that a similar initiative had already been put forward by the former American Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, during a tour in the region, but had been rejected by both the Palestinians and the Jordanians. and the Egyptians.
“Based on our experience from the 1970s to 1980s of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, any temporary measure adopted by Israel eventually becomes permanent,” he says.
MP Saleh al-Armouti, a member of the main opposition Islamic Action Front, calls Trump’s proposal a “violation of Jordan’s sovereignty” and a “declaration of war.” He recalls that King Abdullah II had drawn “red lines”: “no Judaization of Jerusalem, no resettlement of Palestinians and no alternative homeland.”
Agence France-Presse
