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Hamas released three more Israeli men from captivity in Gaza on Saturday, after the increasingly fragile four-week ceasefire nearly collapsed in a week of brinkmanship.
The Israelis were handed over to the International Committee of the Red Cross in an elaborately staged ceremony in Khan Younis, a mostly destroyed city — and Hamas stronghold — in the southern Gaza Strip.
They had been taken hostage from their homes in the kibbutz Nir Oz during the Palestinian militant group’s assault on Israel on October 7 2023 in which about 1,200 people were killed, according to Israeli officials.
Sagui Dekel-Chen, a 36-year old American-Israeli, Russian-Israeli Sasha Troufanov, 29, and Argentine-Israeli Iair Horn, 46, appeared, at least physically, to be in better shape than the previous group of gaunt male hostages who were released last weekend.
During the ceremony Hamas fighters showed off weapons and uniforms that they had captured from Israeli military bases during the cross-border raid in 2023.
Israel started releasing more than 350 Palestinian prisoners later on Saturday under the terms of the ceasefire, 36 of whom were serving life sentences for violence against Israelis.
The vast majority of the others had been held without trial in Israeli prisons after being detained in Gaza during the 15 months of war. More than 48,000 people have been killed in the besieged strip since the war began, according to local officials.
The agreement nearly collapsed earlier this week after Hamas claimed Israel was violating the ceasefire by blocking the entry into Gaza of heavy machinery to clear rubble and mobile homes to house hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinian civilians.
Hamas threatened to delay the release of the hostages if Israel did not facilitate entry of the equipment as required under the ceasefire agreement. In the following days, Arab media broadcast images of some heavy machinery entering via Egypt, and Hamas on Friday agreed to continue the staggered releases of hostages.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed on Saturday that he had forced Hamas to back down by redeploying troops close to the Gaza border in southern Israel and vowing to restart the war if the release did not take place as scheduled.
“This week, again, Hamas attempted to violate the agreement and create a false crisis,” he said in a statement.
Following the releases, US President Donald Trump appeared to back down from his threat earlier this week that “all hell” would “break out” if Hamas did not release “all” the hostages by 12 o’clock on Saturday.
Instead he wrote on Truth Social that he would leave it to Israel to take any action.
“Israel will now have to decide what they will do about the 12:00 O’CLOCK, TODAY, DEADLINE imposed on the release of ALL HOSTAGES. The United States will back the decision they make!”, he wrote.
The three-stage ceasefire is in a transition period between the first and second phases, during which negotiations to bring an end to the war are supposed to be taking place.
In the first six-week period — which ends in early March — Hamas is required to release 33 Israeli hostages including all children, women and men over 50.
By Saturday, it had released 24 people — 19 Israelis and five Thai farm workers who were also taken hostage on October 7. Many of the remaining 73 hostages are thought to be dead. Of the remaining 14 covered in this first phase, only six hostages are alive.
The group originally took about 250 people hostage on October 7, 2023. It released about 120 during a short ceasefire in November 2023 in exchange for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners.
Hamas will only begin to release the male soldiers it took captive and hand over the bodies of the dead hostages if negotiations succeed in converting the temporary ceasefire into a permanent truce. That would require Israel to withdraw its forces from Gaza permanently.
Those talks were due to begin last week but Israel has yet to dispatch any high-level teams to Qatar or Egypt, which are mediating the agreement alongside the US.
The ceasefire’s framework is increasingly coming under strain because of operational wrangles and Trump’s repeated assertions that he intends the US to take over Gaza.
Trump’s proposal, which could result in the mass expulsion of some 2.3mn Palestinian civilians, has emboldened Netanyahu, who is increasingly reluctant to end the war with Hamas.
Trump hosted Jordan’s King Abdullah at the White House this week and repeated his assertion that Jordan and Egypt would take in the refugees, despite widespread condemnation of the plan in the Arab world.
“We say to the world there is no migration except to Jerusalem,” said Hamas in a statement after Saturday’s hostage release. “This is our response to Trump’s calls for displacement and liquidation.”
Additional reporting by Steff Chávez in Washington
