Palestinians gather to celebrate in the streets of Rafah, Gaza. Photo / Youssef Alzanoun / Middle East Images via AFP
After 470 days of death, a tentative cease-fire began on Sunday in Gaza. But Palestinians could not be sure that the war had ended, and Israelis fear that many hostages will still remain in Gaza.
As a truce took hold Sunday in the Gaza Strip, potentially ending the longest and deadliest war in a century of Israeli-Palestinian conflict, two men used the same metaphor to describe how they felt.
“The weight on my chest has lifted,” said Ziad Obeid, a Gaza civil servant displaced several times during the war. “We have survived.”
“The rock lying on my heart has been removed,” said Dov Weissglas, a former Israeli politician. “We want to see the hostages home, period.”
Both men also had a “but”.
Obeid has not seen his damaged house in northern Gaza for more than a year. How bad, he wondered, is the damage? Who will rebuild a decimated Gaza? And will Hamas still run it?
Weissglas worried about the conditions of the hostages set to be freed gradually over the next few weeks from dank quarters in the territory. And he grimaced about exchanging them for hundreds of Palestinian detainees, many of whom are serving life sentences for attacks on Israelis. “There is relief,” he said, “wrapped in caution, fears and concern”.
It was an apt summary of the mood on both sides of the divide Sunday, as Israelis and Palestinians expressed feelings of elation tinged with doubt.
For Palestinians, the truce is meant to provide at least six weeks without strikes on Gaza. That offers a window for Palestinians to take tentative first steps towards reconstruction; to find relatives still buried in the rubble; and to come to terms with the killing of more than 45,000 people, both civilians and combatants, whose bodies have already been counted by the Gaza health authorities. Scenes of joy were broadcast Sunday from across the territory, as rescue workers threw confetti; crowds danced and chanted amid the rubble; and journalists symbolically removed their flak jackets.
For Israelis, the deal allows for the gradual release of at least 33 of the hostages captured during Hamas’ raid on Israel on October 7, 2023 – an attack that killed up to 1200 people and provoked Israel’s devastating 15-month response. For the hostages released alive, that means freedom after 470 days of captivity. For Israelis at large, many of them wracked by a form of survivors’ guilt, it offers qualified catharsis. In the embodiment of that mood, friends of one of the first three hostages released Sunday were filmed leaping with jubilation after hearing news of her freedom.
But the details of the deal between Israel and Hamas mean that both sides still face considerable uncertainty about how the next six weeks will play out, let alone about whether the tentative arrangement will later become permanent. Even the first phase started hours behind schedule on Sunday morning, amid disputes about which hostages would be released in the afternoon. In that time, according to Gaza authorities, Israeli strikes killed and wounded yet more people.
For now, Israel also still controls vast tracts of Gaza and has yet to agree to a full withdrawal, preventing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, like Obeid, from returning to homes in northern Gaza. It remains to be seen whether Israeli troops will ever entirely leave.
“What happens after 42 days?” Weissglas said. “Nobody knows.”
Palestinians also remain unclear about the fates of several thousand people detained incommunicado during the war and who may not be released during the upcoming exchanges. Reema Diab, a housewife in central Gaza, still has no way of locating her husband, a horse trainer, who she said was taken for interrogation in Israel in December 2023 and has not been heard from since.
“I’m relieved the bloodshed is coming to an end, but my heart aches,” Diab said. “His absence is unimaginable.”
Across the border, Israeli columnists struck a sombre tone, with one, Ben Caspit, describing a blend of joy and sadness, “inseparably intertwined”. He wrote that Sunday was a day of reckoning, not celebration, and he emphasised that Israel would now need to come to terms with the scale of its failure on October 7, 2023.
“Let us be silent for a moment, let us study our conscience, let us suffer the disaster, let us think about those who were killed and murdered and burned and raped and kidnapped,” Caspit wrote in Maariv, a right-leaning daily newspaper.
Israelis also feared already for the fates of some 65 hostages who may not be released from Gaza if the deal collapses after six weeks. Similarly, there were widespread fears that the initial 33 hostages set to be released over the next 42 days may be emotionally or physically scarred, or even dead. And Israelis generally lamented that the hostages’ freedom would be obtained in exchange for Palestinian detainees, including some convicted of major terrorist attacks as well as teenagers who have never been charged.
Palestinians see the soon-to-be-released detainees as freedom fighters and political prisoners. For Israelis, it will be a psychological blow to see “this stream of murderers being released,” Weissglas said.
Videos of Hamas fighters re-emerging in triumph from hiding were also a gut-punch for Israelis, who had hoped the war would completely destroy the group’s military abilities. For many people in Gaza, it was a sight to be celebrated, but for others, it was a reminder of lingering uncertainty about Gaza’s future governance.
Obeid works for the Palestinian Authority, which lost power to Hamas in Gaza 18 years ago but still employs some Gaza civil servants, including Obeid, and now hopes to play a bigger role in post-war Gaza. Obeid said he had been liaising in recent days with the authority’s leaders in the West Bank to plan potential cleanup and reconstruction operations in Gaza. It is unclear, he said, whether those efforts will be possible with Hamas still in charge over the next six weeks, and perhaps even beyond.
It is also unclear when Israel will allow Obeid, who fled to Egypt last year after being displaced three times in Gaza, to return home.
But all of that can be addressed in time, Obeid said.
For now, he said, “I can breathe oxygen again.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Patrick Kingsley
Photographs by: Amit Elkayam and Avishag Shaar-Yashuv
©2025 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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