Gaza special: ceasefire and hostage deal agreed
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This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Paul Moss, and in this special edition, recorded on Wednesday 15th January, a ceasefire deal in Gaza is announced, an agreement to end 15 months of war. It's due to start on Sunday. US President Joe Biden confirmed the deal, which involves a full and complete withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza and the release of all the hostages held by Hamas. We'll have the latest from our correspondents in Jerusalem and Washington. It was the Prime Minister of Qatar who announced details of the deal. Qatar has been hosting and mediating talks between the two sides. This is what Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Yassin Al Thani had to say at a news conference in Doha.
We've been raising the question of the right moment for the entire period since the collapse of the first phase. But we have seen a momentum that started to build in the last month, and we kept pushing for that, working together very closely with our partners. And I can say that what we have seen from the U.S. in the past few days, seeing a collaboration transcending both administrations, was a clear demonstration for the commitment of the U.S. to reach to that deal. And I really would like to thank both the envoys who are here with us in the last couple of days, and they played a vital role in reaching to this moment. Of course, for us and Egypt, this is something that we are a stakeholder in that conflict, that we have to do it and we have to help and support. But we have seen the steps that's been taken recently from the U.S. has yielded to this moment.
Qatar's prime minister. What's striking about the ceasefire deal is that it's really just a more detailed version of the outline agreement drawn up in the middle of last year. As our Jerusalem correspondent Jonah Fisher explained to me.
This is a deal that in effect has been around for seven or eight months. It was first put forward by the Biden administration in May of last year. It's taken that long for it to gain enough momentum, for enough pressure to be put on on all sides for it to culminate in what we've seen in the last hour or so, confirmation that a deal had been reached. It's a 42-day ceasefire. that we'll see a phased release of 33 hostages that Hamas took during the October 7th, 2023 attack. That's hostages who are basically women, children, elderly, sick and injured. And it's not entirely clear at this point that all 33 of them are still alive. Every time that Hamas releases a live hostage or a body, Israel will in return release dozens of Palestinian prisoners from its jails here in Israel. So it's a phased release of those hostages. And at the same time, Israel will be pulling back its forces from the more densely populated parts of the Gaza Strip to a buffer zone effectively on the eastern edge of
of the Gaza Strip where it borders Israel and at the same time the displaced people of Gaza nearly two million of them will be allowed to return to well we could term their homes obviously many of them are going to discover when they do go back to where they lived before that what they called their home has been reduced to rubble by the Israeli attacks and the violence.
And we're hearing that the Israeli security cabinet is going to vote on this deal tomorrow. It's presumably still an open question, isn't it, whether the deal will pass. Many people in it were virulently opposed to any deal like this.
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