Rifts with Hamas and a far-right minister’s threat to resign complicated progress toward the Israeli cabinet’s vote on the deal, which includes the release of hostages.

Israel and Hamas agreed to a deal to halt fighting in Gaza and exchange Israeli hostages for Palestinian prisoners, an official briefed on the deal told Reuters on Wednesday, opening the way to a possible end to a devastating 15-month conflict.

A new report published in the U.K. medical journal The Lancet indicates that far from exaggerating the human suffering in Gaza, the ministry has likely underestimated the true number of the dead by as much as 41 percent.

Israel’s leaders claimed the right to self-defence against Hamas, but as Omer Bartov, a major historian of the Holocaust, recognised in August 2024, they sought from the very beginning “to make the entire Gaza Strip uninhabitable,

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Thursday that a “last minute crisis” with Hamas was holding up Israeli approval of a long-awaited agreement to pause the fighting in the Gaza Strip and release dozens of hostages.

There was no immediate comment from Italian judicial authorities or from The Hague on the request ... to-day management of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, including the entry of humanitarian ...

Chaos erupted at Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s final press conference Thursday after an announced Israel-Hamas cease-fire and hostage deal, with State Department employees forcibly removing reporters who accused the cabinet official of allowing a “genocide” in Gaza.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said Thursday his Cabinet won’t meet to approve the agreement for a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip and the release of dozens of hostages until Hamas backs down, accusing the group of reneging on parts of the agreement in an attempt to gain further concessions.

Why aren’t you in The Hague? Why aren’t you in The Hague ... to receive food aid in Deir al Balah in the central Gaza Strip on Thursday.Credit...Eyad Baba/Agence France-Presse — Getty ...

By the time Qatar’s prime minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, announced a ceasefire deal last Wednesday evening, mediators had scrambled again to defuse objections by both sides. Even then, disagreements and delays continued over the two days that followed.

Israel said it will maintain control of the Rafah border crossing between Egypt and the Gaza Strip during the first phase of the ceasefire with Hamas. A statement by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office on Wednesday denied reports that the Western-backed Palestinian Authority would control the crossing.