Gaza ceasefire has now come into effect, Israel’s military says – live | Israel

Israeli military has said that the ceasefire agreement has come into effect, as troops have now retreated to the deployment lines agreed upon.

In a statement released on Telegram, the IDF says troops “began positioning themselves along the updated deployment lines” from midday local time.

“IDF troops in the Southern Command are deployed in the area and will continue to remove any immediate threat,” the statement adds.

The IDF now has a 53% control of the Strip – most of these areas fall outside urban zones.

Patrick Wintour

UN aid teams are ready to roll into Gaza with food and shelter, but the big question in the coming hours and days will be whether Israel lifts the impediments to the flow of aid, warned Tom Fletcher, the head of the UN humanitarian aid agency OCHA.

Fletcher also said the UN would have to work alongside Hamas to remove blockages to the distribution of aid inside Gaza just as the UN has to make pragmatic decisions about the distribution of aid all round the world.

Fletcher told BBC Radio 4 he was “in very close touch with the Israeli authorities to make sure those obstacles, those impediments are now removed. We need all the crossings to be open. We need safe routes for our convoys. We need our people protected. Hundreds of my colleagues have been killed in the last two years. We need the removal of red tape, and physical barriers. We need the power back on to our bakeries, our hospitals, our water stations.”

He also called for the international media to be let back in to hold the UN to account for saving lives. Fletcher is a former chief foreign policy adviser to three UK prime ministers, and is likely to be a critical diplomatic conduit in the weeks ahead.

Asked about whether the UN was prepared to work with Hamas to distribute aid, he said: “Our major priority is to get that aid to civilians where it is most needed. Here in Gaza, as everywhere, we have to work in a neutral, impartial, independent, principled way. Everywhere we work we always have to negotiate access with whoever is on the ground but we should not have to ask to get to civilians. We will work with everyone we have to work with to get pass the blockages, whether those are on the border or the armed groups inside Gaza to reach the communities that need support right now.”

He said the UN had a 60-day plan ready to roll, adding: “We have fought and beaten famines before, and we will do it again this time.”

He said objective number one was to get hundreds of truckloads of high nutrition food in so that Gaza is flooded with food, generosity, and aid. He said the UN had 172,000 metric tonnes of food and medicine, “all cleared, pre-positioned, ready to go in at the crossings”. Water was needed for 1.4 million people and preparations needed to be made for the winter ahead, requiring the supply of thousands of tents.

He said: “The real breakthrough is when the hostages are home, when children are fed, and when they can sleep without terror under a roof without fear of being bombed and maimed and they can be operated on using anaesthetic and they can go back to school.” He said the aim was to get 700,000 school-age children into some form of education and supplied with books, pens and papers.

It will be early test of the ceasefire whether past Israeli objections to the UN supply of aid is lifted, and whether UN Palestinian rights agency UNRWA, separate from OCHA, is allowed to start operating again. UNRWA has been accused by Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, of being “perforated by Hamas” and banned by Israel. Unrwa denied the allegations and was cleared by UN investigators.

As yet there has been little mention of the return of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, the hugely controversial alternative aid distribution mechanism set up by Israel designed to bypass what Israel said was food looting by Hamas, near whose sites hundreds Palestinians were killed by Israeli troops.

There are no plans for British or European troops to be in Gaza after the ceasefire agreement, the UK’s foreign secretary Yvette Cooper said. “That’s not our plan, there’s no plans to do that,” she said on Friday morning to BBC Breakfast.

She added: “But there is an immediate proposal for the US to lead what is effectively like a monitoring process to make sure that this happens on the ground, to oversee the process with hostage release, and also making sure that this first stage is implemented, getting the aid in place, but they have also made very clear that they expect the troops on the ground to be provided by neighbouring states, and that is something that we do expect to happen.”

Cooper said she hopes the ceasefire will be implemented “immediately”. According to the foreign secretary, there are international discussions on an “international security force” and the UK was continuing to contribute in other ways, including looking at getting private finance into Gaza.

Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme, Cooper later added: “This has to be the beginning of the end of the war, and the delivery of a just and lasting peace, of security for Palestinians and Israelis alike. We’ve had two agonising years of suffering, tens of thousands of lives lost, hostages being held far away from their families for two years.”

Israel’s government has ratified a plan for a ceasefire in Gaza and the release of all remaining hostages held by Hamas in a key step towards ending the devastating two-year war.

Senior officials in Washington said a US military team of 200 people would be deployed in the region to “oversee” the truce after Israel and Hamas agreed to the first phase of the Trump administration’s plan to halt the fighting.

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said the cabinet early on Friday approved the “outline” of a deal to release all the hostages – living and dead – without mentioning other aspects of the plan that are contentious.

An Israeli official said that, according to the agreement, the ceasefire should begin immediately after the government approval. The Israeli military had 24 hours to pull back its forces to an agreed-upon line. After that period, the hostages held in Gaza would be freed within 72 hours, a government spokesperson said.

Israelis and Palestinians alike rejoiced after the ceasefire deal was announced, while there was joy but also anxiety in Gaza amid fears the new deal could collapse.

In other key developments:

• Hamas’ exiled Gaza chief Khalil Al-Hayya said he had received guarantees from the US and other mediators that the war was over.

• The head of the US military’s Central Command, Admiral Brad Cooper, would initially have 200 people on the ground, a senior US official said. “His role will be to oversee, observe, make sure there are no violations.”

• Egyptian, Qatari, Turkish and probably Emirati military officials would be embedded in the team, the US official said. A second official said that “no US troops are intended to go into Gaza”.

• Israeli strikes continued in the hours leading up to the Israeli cabinet’s vote. Explosions were seen on Thursday in northern Gaza, and a strike on a building in Gaza City killed at least two people and left more than 40 trapped under rubble, according to Palestinian civil defence.

• At least 11 dead Palestinians and another 49 who were wounded arrived at hospitals over the past 24 hours, Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry said.

• Israel was hitting targets that posed a threat to its troops as they reposition, said an Israeli military official who spoke on condition of anonymity. Hamas blasted Israel over the strike, saying Netanyahu was trying to “shuffle the cards and confuse” efforts by mediators to end the war.

• Twenty Israeli hostages are still believed to be alive in Gaza, while 26 are presumed dead, and the fate of two is unknown

• The Trump administration broader 20-point ceasefire plan includes many unanswered questions, such as whether and how Hamas will disarm. But both sides appeared closer than they have been in months to ending the war, which was triggered by Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack on Israel, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken hostage, promoting an Israeli response that has left more than 67,000 Palestinians dead and nearly 170,000 wounded, according to Gaza’s health ministry.

• Al Jazeera reports that the US military will set up a task force of 200 troops, although they will not be entering the enclave, White House sources say.

• The IDF said Mordechai Nachmani, a 26-year-old reservist soldier, was killed in a Hamas sniper attack in Gaza City on Thursday afternoon. This came after Israeli and Hamas negotiators signed a deal in Egypt to secure the release of the hostages, however the ceasefire part of the agreement had not yet taken place.

• Israeli outlet Haaretz has published the names of Palestinian prisoners it believes could be released as part of the new deal. 250 Palestinian prisoners who are serving life sentences are expected to be released as part of the agreement, out of approximately 290 currently held in Israeli prison. 22 children will also be freed.