On Jan. 17, 2025, the Israeli government ratified a ceasefire deal with Hamas that will pause the war in Gaza for an initial six weeks and begin a staged exchange of hostages for Palestinian prisoners. The approval came after a long cabinet meeting that ended in the early hours of Saturday, following an earlier sign-off by the security cabinet.
The decision was politically fraught from the start. Far-right members of Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition had threatened to oppose the deal or even leave the government, raising the prospect that months of negotiations could still unravel. In the end, the full cabinet met for six hours and announced approval after 1 a.m. Jerusalem time. A separate meeting in Cairo involving Egypt, Qatar, the United States and Israel also produced agreement on the arrangements needed to implement the truce.
The first phase is expected to last 42 days and includes the release of 33 hostages, among them children, women, female soldiers and men over 50. In exchange, hundreds of Palestinian prisoners are to be freed from Israeli jails. Roughly 100 of the prisoners are serving life sentences for violent attacks, while others were jailed for lesser offenses or held in administrative detention. Israel said it would release the names of the hostages only after they had been transferred to the Israel Defense Forces, while Hamas was expected to publish its own list on the eve of the ceasefire.
The deal sets out a staggered timetable. Three Israeli hostages were expected to be released on Sunday, with four more on the seventh day and further releases at the end of each week. The agreement also includes Palestinians displaced inside Gaza being able to move more freely, wounded people being evacuated abroad for treatment, and aid rising to 600 trucks a day. That is above the minimum level humanitarian agencies say is needed to confront the crisis in the territory. The wider plan also envisions a second phase in which the remaining living hostages are returned and Israel withdraws from Gaza, followed by a third phase that would address bodies of the dead and reconstruction.
For now, the ratification is only the first step in a process with many unresolved questions, including future governance of Gaza. The Biden administration and much of the international community have said the Palestinian Authority should eventually return to the strip, but Israel has repeatedly rejected that idea. Still, the approval itself was an important milestone. It came after months of pressure from hostage families, international mediators and governments that wanted the war to pause before the fighting claimed even more lives. The challenge from here is whether the deal can survive the political strain that nearly prevented it from being approved in the first place.
Even with approval in hand, the hard part is still ahead. The first phase is only the opening of a longer process that depends on negotiations starting 16 days into the truce, on whether hostage releases proceed in the announced sequence and on whether humanitarian access actually increases inside Gaza. The plan also leaves the future of Gaza’s governance unresolved, which means the ceasefire may pause the war before it settles the political question that helped prolong it.
