Hamas has said that it is ready to hand over the 20 living hostages today, the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday.
“Israel is prepared and ready for the immediate reception of all our hostages,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated.
Israel believes that Hamas will release the living hostages before midnight on Sunday, so that the hostages will be in Israeli care by the time US President Donald Trump arrives on Monday morning. Reports have indicated that the hostages are set to be released from three separate locations.
This contradicts Hamas's comments from earlier on Sunday that they would reportedly release all remaining hostages, living and deceased, by dawn on Monday, October 13, an Israeli official told The Jerusalem Post.
Hamas has reportedly begun to gather the living hostages in preparation for their handover to representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which is expected to begin at around 6 a.m.
However, Hamas has yet to announce the location of the handover, and Israeli authorities currently have no indication of where the transfer will take place or whether there will be more than one handover site.
“We know from previous releases that in the days leading up to the handover, Hamas would gather the hostages in one place in preparation for their release. We assume that’s what they did over the past 24 hours,” an Israeli security official told Maariv.
Israel is operating under two main assumptions. The first, that the hostages, both living and deceased, will be released all at once. The second is that their release will happen by 9 a.m., Trump's expected arrival.
Previous expectations of the hostage release
All hostages were expected to be released by noon on Monday at the latest, 72 hours after the ceasefire went into effect following the Israeli government's vote to ratify the deal.
Additionally, Arab reports indicated that Hamas had begun collecting the remains of deceased hostages to return to Israel; however, there is a fear that Hamas may have lost some of the bodies of the deceased.
“My biggest fear is that we will be told ‘not found,’ and families will be left without closure,” Yehuda Avidan, Director-General of Israel’s Ministry of Religious Services, said in a radio interview to KAN. “We do not trust [Hamas] with anything."
The agreement was announced after intensive talks in Sharm el-Sheikh, where US Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff and Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner pushed Israel and Hamas to an agreement, along with Qatari and Egyptian mediators.
This is a developing story.