Israel-Gaza war live: Israeli soldier held hostage by Hamas received by Red Cross with further releases expected

Reporting from Tel Aviv:

A crowd gathered from early morning in Tel Aviv’s Hostage Square, many carrying placards with the faces of the three Israelis due for release on Thursday.

They cheered as live footage from Gaza showed soldier Agam Berger, 19, the first to be handed over, alive and walking independently, surrounded by Hamas fighters.

“She made it,” said Yahel Oren, 31, watching the large screen in tears. “Its hard to think of her alone there, but at least we can count the minutes she has left.”

Oren served a decade ago at the Nahal Oz base where Berger was captured. Part of a group campaigning for the freedom of the female ‘spotter’ troops held in Gaza, she was wearing a T-shirt saying “once a spotter always a spotter”.

There were cheers again after Berger, the last female soldier held in Gaza, was handed to the Red Cross in the north of the strip.

Two civilian hostages, Arbel Yehoud 29, and Gadi Moses, 80, were expected to be released later in the morning in southern Gaza.

By late morning the crowd was hundreds strong, with schoolchildren and parents pushing babies, beside veterans of the long campaign to “bring them home”. Some had taken the day off, to join the crowd for a rare moment of joy after more than a year of anguish.

One waved a Thai flag, for five Thai nationals also due for release on Thursday. They have not yet been named.

Ruth Michaelson

Ruth Michaelson and Obaida Hamad in Suwayda:

Suwayda is well equipped for protests. The central square of the city, home to one of Syria’s larger minority communities, hosts the crowds of weekly – or sometimes even daily – demonstrators calling for the representation and public services they have demanded for years.

Long before the fall last month of the regime of Bashar al-Assad, the southern province of the same name had become a byword for resistance to rule by Damascus, unafraid to protest despite Assad’s crackdown on dissent and his hollow pledges to protect communities like theirs.

The area is overwhelmingly filled with members of the Druze sect, who follow an esoteric form of Islam whose adherents span a swath of Lebanon and Syria, including the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. Even before Assad fled last month as an insurgency reached Damascus, residents of Suwayda had been demanding a secular state that enshrined minority rights, and are now emphatically insisting their voices be heard in the new Syria.

“Since last August until now we’ve been protesting daily,” said Alia Kuntar, a lawyer, after the weekly demonstration held in Suwayda City’s central square in front of a metal pavilion emblazoned with the words “Peace to all Syrians”. “And we will keep protesting until we get the state we want. We haven’t felt any crackdown from the new government, but equally we didn’t see any action on the ground in response to our demands.”

She added: “Of course, we’ll increase our demonstrations until we get what we want.”

Protests in Suwayda began in August 2023 for increased public services and quickly spilled into demands for Assad to go, in a place that his regime had long ignored. The southern province was a rare pocket of resistance for well over a year before his rule collapsed amid a wider insurgency at the end of 2024. It now presents a challenge for Syria’s caretaker government, which is led by the Islamists who toppled Assad.

The Israeli military said on Thursday that freed Israeli female soldier Agam Berger had been handed over to the army by the Red Cross after her release in Gaza by Hamas.

“The returning hostage is currently being accompanied by … special forces and ISA (Israel Security Agency – Shin Bet) forces on her return to Israeli territory, where she will undergo an initial medical assessment,” the military said in a statement.

A female Israeli soldier has been seen waving from a podium set up at the hostage handover location in Gaza, reports Reuters. Live TV showed the soldier being led by armed men to the stage, according to the news agency.

Live TV shows Red Cross vehicles arriving at the hostage handover point in Gaza, reports Reuters.

Earlier, militants from Hamas and allied groups Islamic Jihad and Popular Resistance Committees arrived at the site in Khan Younis ahead of the handover of Israeli hostages, according to Hamas sources and witnesses.

According to Reuters, the spokesperson of the Islamic Jihad armed wing said on the Telegram platform that the group “completed procedures to hand over two Israeli hostages”.

Three Israeli hostages are to be released on Thursday under the terms of the ceasefire deal with Hamas have been named as Arbel Yehoud, 29, Agam Berger, 20, and Gadi Mozes, 80. Five Thai nationals are also set to be released, although their names have not been publicly released. In exchange, Israel will free 110 Palestinian prisoners, including 30 minors, according to NGO the Palestinian Prisoners’ Club.

The main UN agency serving Palestinians in the occupied territories, including Gaza, looks set to be shut down on Thursday as Israel defied widespread international support for the agency in a move Unrwa predicted would “sabotage Gaza’s recovery and political transition”.

And for a third straight day, thousands of Palestinians in southern Gaza trekked by foot, motorbike and animal-drawn carts back to their homes in the war-ravaged north after Israeli forces withdrew from the two main roads earlier this week.

The column of people stretched for miles along Gaza’s coastal road on Wednesday. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said that over 376,000 Palestinians had reached northern Gaza from the south.

Here are some more recent developments:

• Ahmed al-Sharaa, the former leader of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the Islamist rebel group which led the military operation to topple Bashar al-Assad last month, has been appointed president of Syria for a “transitional period”.

• Al-Qaida’s affiliate group in Syria, Hurras al-Din, has announced its dissolution just weeks after the regime of Bashar al-Assad was toppled by Islamist group HTS.

• US Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff visited Gaza on Wednesday, then met with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The US envoy met with Netanyahu alone for more than two hours, an Israeli official said, before they were joined by other ministers. An Israeli government spokesperson and the White House official declined to provide any details on Witkoff’s visit to Gaza, which Israel’s public broadcaster Kan said included an inspection of the Netzarim corridor.

• An Israeli airstrike on Wednesday killed at least 10 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, the Palestinian health ministry said, in an attack which the Israeli military said targeted armed militants. The airstrike was in the area of Tubas, in the northern West Bank, the Palestinian Red Crescent said.

• Turkey on Wednesday condemned an Israeli strike that killed three of its citizens who attempted to illegally cross from Lebanon to Israel. “It has been learned that the three Turkish citizens, with whom contact had been lost while attempting to cross illegally from Lebanon to Israel, lost their lives as a result of an Israeli airstrike in the region,” the foreign ministry said in a statement.

• Egypt’s president rejected on Wednesday a suggestion by President Donald Trump that Palestinians from the war-torn Gaza Strip be moved to neighbouring Egypt and Jordan, saying it would undermine the idea of an independent Palestinian state and that an influx of refugees could destabilise his country. In his first public comments on Trump’s suggestion, Abdel Fattah el-Sissi said “there are historical rights that cannot be ignored” and called the idea “an injustice” to which Egypt would not be party.

• The president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Mirjana Spoljaric, told the UN general assembly that “respect for international humanitarian law is in crisis” and “threatening the very humanity that these laws seek to preserve”, citing the situations Lebanon, Syria, Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank.

• The official death toll in Gaza since Israel launched its war on the territory after the 7 October attacks now stands at 47,417, according to the territory’s ministry of health. In its latest daily update, the ministry added that the latest figure for people injured was 111,571.