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What are the Main Elements of the Gaza Ceasefire Deal?

A boy runs with a Palestinian flag atop a mound of rubble at a camp for people displaced by conflict in Bureij in the central Gaza Strip on January 17, 2025 following the announcement of a truce amid the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas. (Photo by Eyad BABA / AFP)
A boy runs with a Palestinian flag atop a mound of rubble at a camp for people displaced by conflict in Bureij in the central Gaza Strip on January 17, 2025 following the announcement of a truce amid the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas. (Photo by Eyad BABA / AFP)
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What are the Main Elements of the Gaza Ceasefire Deal?

A boy runs with a Palestinian flag atop a mound of rubble at a camp for people displaced by conflict in Bureij in the central Gaza Strip on January 17, 2025 following the announcement of a truce amid the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas. (Photo by Eyad BABA / AFP)
A boy runs with a Palestinian flag atop a mound of rubble at a camp for people displaced by conflict in Bureij in the central Gaza Strip on January 17, 2025 following the announcement of a truce amid the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas. (Photo by Eyad BABA / AFP)

Here are the main elements of a Gaza ceasefire deal that went into effect on Sunday after 15 months of conflict that has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians and inflamed the Middle East. The start of the ceasefire was delayed for almost three hours after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asked Hamas to provide a list of the hostages who were due to be released during the day. An Israeli official said later that Israel had received the list, Reuters reported.
Details of the agreement have not yet been publicly announced by the mediators, Israel or Hamas. Officials briefed on the deal provided the following elements:
* A six-week initial ceasefire phase includes the gradual withdrawal of Israeli forces from central Gaza and the return of displaced Palestinians to northern Gaza.
* The deal requires 600 truckloads of humanitarian aid to be allowed into Gaza every day of the ceasefire, 50 of them carrying fuel, with 300 of the trucks allocated to the north, where conditions for civilians are particularly difficult.
* Hamas will release 33 Israeli hostages, including all women (soldiers and civilians), children, and men over 50. Hamas will release female hostages and under 19s first, followed by men over 50. Three female hostages are expected to be released through the Red Cross on Sunday after 1400 GMT, the Israeli Prime Minister's office said.
* Israel will release 30 Palestinian detainees for every civilian hostage and 50 Palestinian detainees for every Israeli female soldier Hamas releases.
* Under the terms of the deal, Hamas will inform the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) where the meeting point will be inside Gaza and the ICRC is expected to begin driving to that location to collect the hostages.
* Israel will release all Palestinian women and children under 19 detained since Oct. 7, 2023 by end of the first phase. The total number of Palestinians released will depend on hostages released, and could be between 990 and 1,650 Palestinian detainees including men, women and children.
* Hamas will release the hostages over a six-week period, with at least three hostages released each week and the remainder of the 33 before the end of the period. All living hostages will be released first, followed by remains of dead hostages.
* The implementation of the agreement will be guaranteed by Qatar, Egypt and the United States.
* Negotiations over a second phase of the agreement will begin by the 16th day of phase one and is expected to include the release of all remaining hostages, including Israeli male soldiers, a permanent ceasefire and the complete withdrawal of Israeli soldiers.
* A third phase is expected to include the return of all remaining dead bodies and the start of Gaza's reconstruction, supervised by Egypt, Qatar and the United Nations.

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A Train Station was Once the Pride of Syria's Capital. Some See it as a Symbol of Revival after War

The Qadam train station, which was damaged during the war between rebel forces and ousted President Bashar Assad's forces, is seen in Damascus, Syria, Monday, Jan. 13, 2025. (AP Photo/Omar Sanadiki)
The Qadam train station, which was damaged during the war between rebel forces and ousted President Bashar Assad's forces, is seen in Damascus, Syria, Monday, Jan. 13, 2025. (AP Photo/Omar Sanadiki)
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A Train Station was Once the Pride of Syria's Capital. Some See it as a Symbol of Revival after War

The Qadam train station, which was damaged during the war between rebel forces and ousted President Bashar Assad's forces, is seen in Damascus, Syria, Monday, Jan. 13, 2025. (AP Photo/Omar Sanadiki)
The Qadam train station, which was damaged during the war between rebel forces and ousted President Bashar Assad's forces, is seen in Damascus, Syria, Monday, Jan. 13, 2025. (AP Photo/Omar Sanadiki)

A train station in Damascus was once the pride of the Syrian capital, an essential link between Europe and the Arabian Peninsula during the Ottoman Empire and then a national transit hub. But more than a decade of war left it a wasteland of bullet-scarred walls and twisted steel.

The Qadam station's remaining staff say they still have an attachment to the railway and hope that it, like the country, can be revived after the swift and stunning downfall of leader Bashar Assad last month.

On a recent day, train operator Mazen Malla led The Associated Press through the landscape of charred train cars and workshops damaged by artillery fire. Bullet casings littered the ground.

Malla grew up near the station. His father, uncles and grandfather all worked there. Eventually he was driving trains himself, spending more than 12 hours a day at work.

“The train is a part of us," he said with a deep, nostalgic sigh, as he picked up what appeared to be a spent artillery shell and tossed it aside. “I wouldn’t see my kids as much as I would see the train.”

The Qadam station was the workhorse of the iconic Hejaz Railway that was built under the Ottoman Empire’s Sultan Abdulhamid II in the early 1900s, linking Muslim pilgrims from Europe and Asia via what is now Türkiye to the holy city of Madinah in Saudi Arabia.

That glory was short-lived. The railway soon became in an armed uprising during World War I backed by Britain, France and other Allied forces that eventually took down the Ottoman Empire.

In the following decades, Syria used its section of the railway to transport people between Damascus and its second city of Aleppo, along with several towns and neighboring Jordan. While the main station, still intact a few miles away, later became a historical site and events hall, Qadam remained the busy home of the workshops and people making the railway run.

As train cars were upgraded, the old wooden ones were placed in a museum. The Qadam station, however, retained its structure of Ottoman stone and French bricks from Marseille.

But war tore it apart after Assad's crackdown on protesters demanding greater freedoms.

“The army turned this into a military base,” Malla said. Workers like him were sent away.

Qadam station was too strategic for soldiers to ignore. It gave Assad's forces a vantage point on key opposition strongholds in Damascus. Up a flight of stairs, an office became a sniper's nest.

The nearby neighborhood of Al-Assali is now mostly in ruins after becoming a no man’s land between the station and the Palestinian refugee camp of Yarmouk that became an opposition stronghold and was besieged and bombarded for years by government forces.

The fighting entered the railway station at least once, in 2013. Footage widely circulated online showed opposition firing assault rifles and taking cover behind trains.

Malla and his family fled their home near the station to a nearby neighborhood. He heard the fighting but prayed that the station that had long been his family's livelihood would be left unscathed.

Assad's forces cleared the opposition from Damascus in 2018. The train station, though badly wrecked, was opened again, briefly, as a symbol of triumph and revival. Syrian state media reported that trains would take passengers to the annual Damascus International Fair. It broadcast images of happy passengers by the entrance and at the destination, but not of the station's vast damage.

Syria’s railway never returned to its former prosperity under Assad, and Malla stayed away as the military maintained control of much of Qadam. After Assad was ousted and the factions who forced him out became the interim administration, Malla returned.

He found his home destroyed. The station, which he described as “part of my soul,” was badly damaged.

“What we saw was tragic,” he said. "It was unbelievable. It was heartbreaking.”

The train cars were battered and burned. Some were piles of scrap. The museum had been looted and the old trains had been stripped for sale on Syria’s black market.

“Everything was stolen. Copper, electric cables and tools — they were all gone,” Malla said.

The trains' distinctive wooden panels had disappeared. Malla and others believe that Assad's fighters used them as firewood during the harsh winters.

In the former no man's land, packs of stray dogs barked and searched for food. Railway workers and families living at the train station say an urban legend spread that the dogs ate the bodies of captives that Assad’s notorious web of intelligence agencies killed and dumped late at night.

Now Malla and others hope the railway can be cleared of its rubble and its dark past and become a central part of Syria's economic revival after war and international isolation. They dream of the railway helping to return the country to its former status as a key link between Europe and the Middle East.

There is much work to be done. About 90% of Syria's population of over 23 million people live in poverty, according to the United Nations. Infrastructure is widely damaged. Western sanctions, imposed during the war, continue.

But already, neighboring Türkiye has expressed interest in restoring the railway line to Damascus as part of efforts to boost trade and investment.

That prospect excites Malla, whose son Malek spent much of his teenage years surviving the war. At his age, his father and uncle were already learning how to operate a steam engine.

“I hope there will soon be job opportunities, so my son can be employed,” Malla said. “That way he can revive the lineage of his grandfather, and the grandfather of his grandfather."