Negotiators raced on Thursday to resolve last-minute disputes in a cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hamas that would free hostages and halt the violence that has devastated Gaza over the past 15 months.
The disputes helped delay by at least one day a critical Israeli vote to approve the deal.
Even though negotiators for Israel and Hamas reached a provisional agreement on Wednesday, they continued to discuss outstanding issues through mediators. The Israeli cabinet, whose approval is needed to move the cease-fire ahead, had been expected to vote on it on Thursday, but the vote was postponed.
The deal has reopened deep divides in Israel, where hard-line members of the governing coalition vehemently oppose a cease-fire. Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s far-right minister for national security, announced on Thursday night that his party would resign from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition should the cabinet approve the cease-fire deal.
The move threatens to destabilize the government at a critical time but should not, in and of itself, prevent the deal from moving ahead.
The United States, which spent months struggling to broker a deal alongside Qatar and Egypt, downplayed the delay and insisted that the cease-fire would take effect on Sunday as planned.
“I am confident and fully expect implementation will begin,” Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken told reporters on Thursday. “It’s not exactly surprising that in a process, a negotiation, that has been this challenging — this fraught — we may get a loose end. We’re tying up that loose end as we speak.”
He added that he had been on the phone with the U.S. envoy to the region and Qatari officials, seeking to resolve final questions.
In Israel, the office of the prime minister accused Hamas of reneging on parts of the agreement.
“There isn’t any deal at the moment,” Mr. Netanyahu’s spokesman, Omer Dostri, said in a text message on Thursday. “Therefore, there’s no cabinet meeting.”
A Hamas official, Izzat al-Rishq, said that the group remained committed to the deal announced by mediators.
The last-minute disagreements over the deal have included questions of which Palestinians could be released and how Israeli forces would deploy along Gaza’s border with Egypt during the truce, Mr. Dostri said.
After many months of watching negotiations to reach a cease-fire collapse repeatedly, many Gazans, Israelis and others expressed only tempered hope about the fate of the current deal.
“I wish I could say I am happy,” said Fadia Nassar, a 43-year-old who lost her home in northern Gaza, displacing her to the south. The deal, she said, could “collapse for any reason.”
“My heart is broken,” she added. “I will probably stay in a tent. Hundreds of thousands will end up in tents.”
And deadly Israeli airstrikes went on in Gaza on Thursday, with the Israeli military saying it had hit about 50 targets across the territory over the past day.
“The reality in the Strip remains very difficult and catastrophic,” said Mahmoud Basal, a spokesman for Gaza’s Civil Defense, an emergency service under the Hamas-run Interior Ministry.
Recent Israeli attacks in the territory killed at least 81 people and injured nearly 200 others, according to Gaza’s health ministry, which does not distinguish between combatants and civilians. The Civil Defense said that Israeli strikes had killed at least 77 people since the deal had been announced. The claims could not be independently verified.
The Israeli military said its recent targets included militants from Hamas and Islamic Jihad, their compounds, weapons storage areas and other sites, adding that “numerous steps” were taken to prevent civilian harm before the strikes.
Mediators hope the cease-fire deal — which would begin with a 42-day truce and the release of some hostages — will ultimately end the war that began with the Hamas-led attack in October 2023, when about 1,200 people in Israel were killed and 250 taken hostage. The subsequent Israeli military campaign has killed tens of thousands of Gazans and forced nearly the entire population of the enclave to flee their homes.
In Israel, Mr. Ben-Gvir and other hard-line members of Mr. Netanyahu’s government, the most right-wing and religiously conservative in Israel’s history, have opposed the deal and pushed for the war to go on until Hamas is eliminated.
Mr. Ben-Gvir’s party, Jewish Power, holds six seats in the 120-seat Parliament, and the party’s withdrawal from the governing coalition would reduce its majority from 68 to a razor-thin 62. He said his party would offer to rejoin the government should it resume the war against Hamas.
Earlier on Thursday, dozens of demonstrators in Israel blocked a main highway in Jerusalem to protest the deal, eventually being dispersed by the police.
One of the protesters, Eliyahu Shahar, 21, said the agreement posed a threat to Israel’s safety and should be rejected, “even if it means more hostages will die.”
If it comes to a vote, the cease-fire agreement is expected to gain Israel’s approval even without the support of two far-right parties in the governing coalition. Families of hostages have hailed the deal, and opposition parties have broadly committed to propping up Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition, if necessary, to secure the implementation of an agreement that would free the Israelis still held in Gaza.
“This is more important than all the differences of opinion that there have ever been between us,” Yair Lapid, Israel’s opposition leader, said in a statement.
Yona Schnitzer, 36, a marketing writer from Tel Aviv, said he felt “careful optimism” about the deal. “I hope the deal will actually happen this time,” he said. “If it’s confirmed and a done deal, I’ll feel relief, firstly because hostages will come home, and secondly because it will bring us closer to ending this war.”
The cease-fire deal would begin with an initial phase lasting six weeks. It would involve the release of 33 hostages and hundreds of Palestinian prisoners, and allow the entry into Gaza of 600 trucks carrying humanitarian relief daily, according to a copy of the agreement obtained by The New York Times.
The European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, described the cease-fire agreement as “the hope the region desperately needed.” But she added that the situation in Gaza remained grim. She announced that Europe would provide $123 million in aid for Gazans this year, along with in-kind aid such as food shipments.
Diplomats hope the first phase of the deal would then lead to more permanent conditions, a point Mr. Blinken stressed on Thursday.
“It’s going to take tremendous effort, political courage, compromise, to realize that possibility, to try to ensure the gains that have been achieved over the past 15 months at enormous, excruciating costs are actually enduring,” he said.
But in Gaza, where ruins dominate the landscape and huge questions remain over what a postwar future will look like, uncertainty and exhaustion reigned.
“It’s undoubtedly a good feeling to hear about the cease-fire,” said Nizar Hammad, a 31-year-old who lost his home in Gaza City. “But when I think about life after the war, I think about the suffering that will continue. The scale of destruction and loss is enormous.”
“Honestly, I feel numb,” said Aseel Mutier, a 22-year-old from Beit Lahia in northern Gaza, whose 16-year-old brother was killed during the war and whose house was destroyed last week.
“We are just waiting for Sunday,” she added. “We don’t know what will happen between now and then.”
Rawan Sheikh Ahmad contributed reporting from Haifa, Israel, and Isabel Kershner and Natan Odenheimer from Jerusalem.
