Israel, Hamas reach tentative deal to pause fighting, free dozens of hostages: Report

Israel, the United States and Hamas are close to a deal that could see dozens of women and children held hostage by the Islamist militant group in Gaza freed in exchange for a five-day pause in fighting, the Washington Post reported on Saturday.

The release of the hostages could begin within the next several days, the US daily reported, citing people familiar with the negotiations.

The agreement, should it materialize, could lead to the first sustained pause in the ongoing conflict in besieged Gaza, the report said. 

Israel has not immediately responded to the publication's report.

A White House spokesperson said no deal has been reached yet and that the US is continuing to work to get a deal between Israel and Hamas.

Israel, the United States, Germany and the European Union designate Hamas as a terror organization. Hamas militants took some 240 people hostage and killed 1,200 during terror attacks in southern Israel on October 7. Israel's military campaign against the militants has killed some 12,300 people, including about 5,000 children, according to Hamas, which has controlled the Gaza Strip since 2007.

The Post reported that the agreement was sketched out during weeks of talks in Doha, Qatar, among Israel, the United States and Hamas, indirectly represented by Qatari mediators, according to Arab and other diplomats. 

However, it was unclear until now that Israel would agree to pause its offensive in Gaza temporarily, provided the conditions were right, the Washington Post said. 

The paper said the six-page deal calls for all parties to the conflict to halt combat operations for at least five days while an initial 50 or more hostages would be released in smaller groups every 24 hours.

The Post said it was not clear how many of the hostages would be released under the agreement. 

The report said that overhead surveillance would monitor movement on the ground to regulate the pause.

The freeze in fighting is also intended to allow a crucial increase in the amount of humanitarian assistance, including fuel, to enter the Palestinian enclave from Egypt, the report said.

WHO calls Al-Shifa hospital a 'death zone,' urges full evacuation

 The World Health Organization said it had led an assessment mission to al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City and determined it was a "death zone" and pushed for a full evacuation of the facility.

"WHO and partners are urgently developing plans for the immediate evacuation of the remaining patients, staff and their families," the United Nations health agency said in a statement, adding that 291 patients and 25 health workers remained inside the hospital.

WHO said this was a high-risk operation in an active conflict zone, with heavy fighting ongoing in close proximity to the hospital. Its team was able to spend only one hour inside the hospital.

According to WHO, the team saw a mass grave at the entrance of the hospital and was told more than 80 people were buried there.

WHO called for "an immediate cease-fire, the sustained flow of humanitarian assistance at scale, unhindered humanitarian access to all of those in need, the unconditional release of all hostages, and the cessation of attacks on health care and other vital infrastructure."

Israel has repeatedly accused Hamas militants of operating from tunnels beneath the vast hospital complex. The White House, relying on US intelligence, has supported Israel's claims, saying that Hamas was storing weapons and operating a command node from the hospital in Gaza.

Hamas has denied having any military presence at the hospital.

Pro-Palestinian protesters rally across Europe

A number of pro-Palestinian demonstrations were held in major European cities including London, Paris and Berlin on Saturday.

Amid torrential rain in Paris, thousands of people marched through the city center holding a banner that read: "Halt the massacre in Gaza and West Bank, immediate cease-fire."

The CGT union estimated that 60,000 people turned up in Paris while the French Interior Ministry put the number at around 7,000 people.

In Berlin, around 4,000 protesters attended a rally, police said.

The protesters chanted "Freedom for Gaza" and "Germany finances, Israel bombs" as they waved Palestinian flags.

Previous pro-Palestinian protests in Germany were banned due to the threat of antisemitism.

On Saturday, the organizers of the Berlin protests used a megaphone to state, "We want to leave peacefully with Jews." They also said they did not support terrorist organizations or murders carried out in Israel.

Protesters in London gathered outside the office of Labour leader Keir Starmer, a former human rights lawyer who is predicted to win the next election. Starmer has called for humanitarian pauses in Gaza but not a cease-fire.

Some of the protesters held signs that read "Stop the war in Gaza" and "Starmer — blood on your hands."

In Geneva, 4,000 people marched and displayed a map of Gaza outside the European headquarters of the United Nations.

Demonstrations were also held in other cities including Amsterdam, Lisbon, Marseilles and Istanbul.

Biden warns against 'forcible displacement' of Palestinians in op-ed

US President Joe Biden has condemned Hamas' attacks in Israel as "pure, unadulterated evil" and said the Palestinian Authority should govern in Gaza after the conflict ends, according to comments published in The Washington Post.

The Palestinian Authority is currently in charge of Palestinian affairs in the occupied West Bank but is not particularly popular. 

In an op-ed, Biden said Hamas was "fighting to wipe a neighboring democracy off the map" and hoped to "collapse broader regional stability and integration."

The United States is among several countries, including Germany as well as the European Union, that classifies Hamas as a terrorist organization.

The US has long pushed for Israel to normalize relations with countries in the Middle East, and negotiations with Saudi Arabia were apparently starting before the start of the war.

The US president reiterated Washington's support of Israel in the face of what he called the "murderous nihilism of Hamas."

He called for a two-state solution to be implemented in Israel and the Palestinian territories, arguing that it "is the only way to ensure the long-term security of both the Israeli and Palestinian people."

Biden said that there "must be no forcible displacement of Palestinians from Gaza, no reoccupation, no siege or blockade, and no reduction in territory."

He urged for Gaza and the occupied West Bank to be "reunited under a single governance structure." He called for a "revitalized Palestinian Authority" to govern the territory.

The US president also said the international community should implement "interim security measures" and "establish a reconstruction mechanism" for Gaza, while also preventing "terrorist threats" from arising in the Palestinian territories.

Tens of thousands reach Jerusalem in march urging action for hostages

Tens of thousands of people have arrived in Jerusalem as part of a five-day march for the release of hostages.

According to Israeli authorities, Hamas militants abducted around 240 people from southern Israel on October 7 as well as killing around 1,200 people.

The demonstrators set out from Tel Aviv on Tuesday. Among the estimated 20,000 demonstrators were family members of some of the hostages, as well as their supporters.

On Saturday, they converged on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office in Jerusalem.

Netanyahu has not yet agreed to meet with those marching. Other members of the War Cabinet, retired general Benny Gantz and former army chief Gadi Eisenkot were set to meet with representatives of the hostages' families later on Saturday.

Participants in the march are calling on the government to strike a deal for the release of the hostages.

So far, four hostages have been released in a deal brokered by Qatar with one hostage freed by Israeli troops.

Earlier this week, Israel said it had found the bodies of two hostages in the northern Gaza Strip. Hamas has also said that some of the hostages were killed in Israeli bombing but this has not been verified. 

'I'm not able to help everyone,' doctor at hospital in Gaza tells DW

DW spoke with a doctor about the difficult conditions facing medical staff and patients at the Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip.

"The situation is really bad," Doctor Heba al-Taweel told DW.

"The most difficult thing has been the realization that I'm not able to help everyone, especially in the case of amputations," she said.

She said that she had not left the hospital complex in days, in order to keep working and had not seen her family for some time.

Hundreds of thousands of residents of Gaza fled southward following an Israeli order to evacuate the north of the Palestinian territory.

More than 2,000 people a day have been coming to the hospital, three times the maximum admissions before the conflict began on October 7 when Hamas militants attacked Israel. The hospital lacks certain basic medical supplies and is faced with frequent power outages.

Over 200 medical personnel have died in Gaza since the beginning of the war between Israel and Hamas.

UN agencies denounce 'horrifying' strike on school in Jabaliya

The head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, the UNRWA, condemned Israeli strikes on UN-run schools in northern Gaza where displaced people have been sheltering. The sites were bombed earlier today. 

On social media, UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini said that he had "received horrifying images and footage of scores of people killed and injured in another @UNRWA school sheltering thousands of displaced in the north of the Gaza Strip."

"These attacks cannot become commonplace, they must stop. A humanitarian ceasefire cannot wait any longer," he said in a post on the platform X, formerly known as Twitter.

Adele Khodr, the UNICEF regional director for the Middle East and North Africa, also called for an "immediate" cease-fire. UNICEF is the UN's children's rights agency. 

"The scenes of carnage and death following attacks on Alfakhoura and Tal Al Zaatar schools in Gaza killing many children and women are horrific and appalling," Khodr wrote on X. 

"Children, schools and shelters are not a target," she added.

The statements from UN officials come after the Health Ministry in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip said that at least 50 people had been killed in a strike on a school in the Jabaliya refugee camp.

The Israeli military did not immediately comment on reports of the strike but said that troops were active in the Jabaliya area "with the aim of hitting terrorists," the Associated Press reported.

Wounded Palestinian children flown to Abu Dhabi

A plane carrying the first group of Palestinian children wounded in the Israel-Hamas conflict has arrived in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which has pledged to help a thousand young people.

The group of 15, including their family members, made it across the Gaza Strip's Rafah border crossing with Egypt, before taking a flight to Abu Dhabi.

Some of the seats of the plane were removed to make room for the most critically wounded children, who needed to lie on stretchers. 

Gaza's hospitals, poorly equipped even before the latest fighting, have been running out of basic supplies and are unable to cope. Since the October 7 attacks by Hamas, which killed around 1,200 Israelis and foreigners, Israel has blockaded Gaza, allowing only minimal supplies, including medical aid, in. 

The UAE has sent dozens of planes carrying food and relief supplies as part of a $20 million aid package, a foreign ministry statement said.

Aid agency staff, families trapped in Gaza

Doctors without Borders (MSF) staff and their families are trapped in the vicinity of Gaza's al-Shifa Hospital, the medical aid organization said in Berlin.

MSF said that 137 people linked to it, including 65 children, were unable to leave and that attempts to evacuate them had failed.

The organization called for an immediate cease-fire to allow civilians to evacuate, warning that a lack of food and drinking water could lead to deaths "in the days, or even hours ahead."

It said that its staff and their families had been unable to leave accommodation near the hospital for the past week.

"On Tuesday, the Doctors without Borders guesthouse came under fire, luckily with no one injured," it said.

The office was hit by shrapnel on Thursday, and the water tank had also come under fire.

Al-Shifa patients, staff and displaced leave

Hundreds of patients, staff and displaced people left Gaza's al-Shifa hospital on Saturday, leaving only a skeleton crew to care for those too sick to move.

Columns of sick and injured — some of them amputees — displaced people, doctors and nurses, made their way toward the seafront, AFP news agency reported.

On Saturday, the Israeli military said it had been asked by the hospital's director to help those who would like to leave do so by a secure route.

The military, however, said it did not order any evacuation, and that medical personnel are being allowed to remain in the hospital to support patients who cannot be moved.

But Medhat Abbas, a spokesman for the Health Ministry in Hamas-controlled Gaza, said the military had ordered the facility cleared, giving the hospital an hour to get people out.

Later, Dr. Ahmed Mokhallalati, an al-Shifa physician, said on social media that there were some 120 patients remaining who were unable to leave.

He said they included some in intensive care and premature babies, and that he and five other doctors were staying behind to care for them.

Israel's military took over the hospital earlier in the week, where it alleges a Hamas command center was located under the building, which Hamas and hospital staff deny.

The United Nations estimated that 2,300 patients, staff and displaced Palestinians were sheltering at al-Shifa before Israeli troops moved in.