Tel Aviv witnessed another day of hope filled with emotions on Saturday as four Israeli hostages who were held captive by Hamas reunited with their families in the second phase of the Gaza ceasefire deal. The four women – Karina Ariev, Daniella Gilboa, and Naama Levy, all aged 20, and Liri Albag (19) – waved, smiled, and gave a thumbs up as they arrived at the border.

“Welcome home Liri, Daniella, Karina and Naama,” the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) said on X.

This is the moment

Welcome home Liri, Daniella, Karina and Naama. pic.twitter.com/1DAbWX9Ix4

— Israel Defense Forces (@IDF) January 25, 2025

They were held captive by Hamas during its attack on October 7, 2023, which killed at least 1200 people. The Lebanon-backed group released them after 477 days of captivity – in exchange for 200 Palestinian prisoners.

IDF also shared multiple videos and pictures of the women reuniting with their families.

Visuals showed the women running towards their family members and hugging them with tears of joy.

They’re in our hands now and we are not letting go

Welcome home, Daniella, Liri, Karina and Naama. pic.twitter.com/A1V9FcbQY6

— Israel Defense Forces (@IDF) January 25, 2025

Another video shows the moment when the released hostages’ families saw their loved ones finally coming back home.

The moment when tears of sadness turned into tears of joy as the released hostages’ families saw their loved ones finally coming back home pic.twitter.com/AvvByt9chZ

— Israel Defense Forces (@IDF) January 25, 2025

Also Read | Gaza’s Youngest Hostage: Hamas Says He’s Dead, Family Hoping Against Hope

According to Daniella’s 15-year-old sister, the family never lost hope. “We remained optimistic and we did everything to see her back here, for her return…Wow, I imagined her totally different. It brought back all the emotions I’ve had this past year,” she said.

Upon their release, Liri, in a video, thanked the Israeli forces for bringing them back.

“I love you all the people of Israel who supported our families and embraced them, and to the IDF soldiers who did everything for us. We are very grateful. I love you,” she said.

The touching message of Liri to the citizens of israel “I love you, thank you!” pic.twitter.com/DOZzmtMmRs

— Am Yisrael Chai (@kyg_best) January 25, 2025

Apart from the families of the released hostages, thousands of people gathered in Hostages Square in Tel Aviv cheering as a giant screen broadcasted the first glimpse of the women. On the other hand, massive celebrations took place in Gaza as buses carrying the Palestinian prisoners arrived in Ramallah on the West Bank.

Ending more than 15 months of war that killed over 47,000 people, Israel began a six-week ceasefire with Hamas in Gaza on January 19. In the first phase of the Gaza ceasefire deal, the Hamas release three women in exchange for 90 Palestinian prisoners.

The Hamas had taken 251 Israeli hostages – 87 of whom remain in Gaza out of which 34 are dead.

During a six-week ceasefire, 33 hostages are being freed in exchange for around 1,900 Palestinians held in Israeli jails.

With much of Gaza reduced to rubble by 10 months of war, counting the dead has become a challenge for the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry, as the death count nears 40,000.

Israel has repeatedly questioned the credibility of the daily figures put out by the ministry and US President Joe Biden did so too in the early stages of the war.

But several United Nations agencies that operate in Gaza have said the figures are credible and they are frequently cited by international organisations. 

Data collection

Two AFP correspondents witnessed health facilities enter deaths in the ministry’s database.

Gaza health officials first identify the bodies of the dead, by the visual recognition of a relative or friend, or by the recovery of personal items.

The dead person’s information is then entered in the health ministry’s digital database, usually including name, gender, birth date and ID number.

When bodies cannot be identified because they are unrecognisable or when no one claims them, staff record the death under a number, alongside all the information they were able to gather.

Any distinguishing marks that may help with later identification, whether personal items or a birthmark, are collected and photographed.

Central registry

Gaza’s health ministry has issued several statements setting out its procedures for compiling the death count.

In public hospitals under the direct supervision of the territory’s Hamas government, the “personal information and identity number” of every Palestinian killed during the war are entered in the hospital’s database as soon as they are pronounced dead.

The data is then sent to the health ministry’s central registry on a daily basis.

For those who die in private hospitals and clinics, their information is taken down on a form that must be sent to the ministry within 24 hours to be added to the central registry, a ministry statement said.

The ministry’s “information centre” then verifies the data entries to “ensure they do not contain any duplicates or mistakes”, before saving them in the database, the statement added.

Gaza residents are also encouraged by Palestinian authorities to report any deaths in their families on a designated government website. The data is used for the ministry’s verifications.

The ministry is staffed with civil servants that answer to the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority as well as to the Hamas-led government in Gaza.

‘High correlation’

An investigation conducted by Airways, an NGO focused on the impact of war on civilians, analysed the data entries for 3,000 of the dead and found “a high correlation” between the ministry’s data and what Palestinian civilians reported online, with 75 percent of publicly reported names also appearing on the ministry’s list.

The study found that the ministry’s figures had become “less accurate” as the war dragged on, a development it attributed to the heavy damage to health infrastructure resulting from the war.

For instance, at southern Gaza’s Nasser Hospital, one of the few still at least partly functioning, only 50 out of 400 computers still work, its director Atef al-Hout told AFP.

Israeli authorities frequently criticise the ministry’s figures for failing to distinguish between combatants and civilians. But neither the army nor Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu deny the scale of the overall count.

The press office of Gaza’s Hamas government estimates that nearly 70 percent of the roughly 40,000 dead are women (about 11,000) or children (at least 16,300).

Several UN agencies, including the agency in charge of Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), have said the ministry’s figures are credible.

“In the past — the five, six cycles of conflict in the Gaza Strip — these figures were considered as credible and no one ever really challenged these figures,”, the agency’s chief Philippe Lazzarini said in October.

A study by British medical review The Lancet estimated that 186,000 deaths can be attributed to the war in Gaza, directly or indirectly as a result of the humanitarian crisis it has triggered.

The war in Gaza was triggered by the October 7 attack by Hamas, which resulted in the deaths of 1,198 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli official figures.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Geneva:

Palestinian health authorities say Israel’s ground and air campaign in Gaza has killed more than 38,000 people, mostly civilians, and driven most of the enclave’s 2.3 million people from their homes.

The war began on Oct. 7 when Hamas operatives rushed across the border into Israeli communities. Israel says the operatives killed more than 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and dragged 253 into captivity in Gaza.

This explainer examines how the Palestinian death count is calculated, how reliable it is, the breakdown of civilians and fighters killed and what each side says.

HOW DO GAZA HEALTH AUTHORITIES CALCULATE THE DEATH COUNT?

In the first months of the war, death counts were calculated entirely from counting bodies that arrived in hospitals and data included names and identity numbers for most of those killed.

As the conflict ground on, and fewer hospitals and morgues continued to operate, the authorities adopted other methods too.

From early May, the Health Ministry updated its breakdown of total fatalities to include unidentified bodies which account for nearly a third of the overall deaths. Omar Hussein Ali, head of the ministry’s emergency operations centre in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, said these were bodies that had arrived at hospitals or medical centres without personal data such as identity numbers or full names.

It also began including deaths reported online by family members who had to input information including identity numbers.

IS THE GAZA DEATH COUNT COMPREHENSIVE?

The numbers “do not necessarily reflect all victims due to the fact that many victims are still missing under the rubble”, the Palestinian Health Ministry says. In May it estimated that some 10,000 bodies were uncounted in this way.

The Lancet medical journal published a letter from three academics on July 5 estimating that indirect deaths, caused by factors such as disease, might mean the death count is several times higher than official Palestinian estimates.

The letter said it was “not implausible to estimate that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza”.

The authors said the figure, which made global headlines, was based on what they said was the conservative estimate of four indirect deaths to one direct death based on trends from prior conflicts.

The U.N. human rights office and the Humanitarian Research Lab at the Yale School of Public Health have also said during the conflict that the true figures are likely higher than those published, without giving specifics.

HOW CREDIBLE IS THE GAZA DEATH COUNT?

Pre-war Gaza had robust population statistics and better health information systems than in most Middle East countries, public health experts told Reuters.

A spokesperson for the World Health Organisation said the ministry has “good capacity in data collection/analysis and its previous reporting has been considered credible”.

The United Nations regularly cites the ministry’s death count figures, while naming the ministry as the source.

Early in the conflict, after U.S. President Joe Biden cast doubt on casualty figures, the health ministry published a detailed list of the 7,028 deaths that had been registered by that point.

Academics looking at details of listed casualties said in a peer-reviewed article in the Lancet medical journal in November that it was implausible that the patterns shown in the list could be the result of fabrication.

However, there are specific questions over the inclusion of 471 people said to have been killed in an Oct. 17 blast at al-Ahli al-Arab hospital in Gaza City. An unclassified U.S. intelligence report estimated that death count “at the low end of the 100 to 300 spectrum”.

DOES HAMAS CONTROL THE FIGURES?

While Hamas has run Gaza since 2007, the enclave’s Health Ministry also answers to the overall Palestinian Authority ministry in Ramallah in the West Bank.

Gaza’s Hamas-run government has paid the salaries of all those hired in public departments since 2007, including in the Health Ministry. The Palestinian Authority still pays the salaries of those hired before then.

The extent of Hamas control in Gaza now is difficult to assess with Israeli forces occupying most of the territory, including around locations of major hospitals that provide casualty figures, and with fighting ongoing.

WHAT DOES ISRAEL SAY?

Israeli officials have said the figures are suspect because of Hamas’ control over government in Gaza. Foreign Ministry spokesperson Oren Mamorstein said the numbers were manipulated and “do not reflect the reality on the ground”.

However, Israel’s military has also accepted in briefings that the overall Gaza casualty numbers are broadly reliable.

In May, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said 14,000 Hamas fighters and 16,000 Palestinian civilians had been killed in the war.

HOW MANY CIVILIANS HAVE BEEN KILLED?

The Health Ministry figures do not differentiate between civilians and Hamas combatants, who do not wear formal uniform or carry separate identification.

Israel periodically provides estimates of how many Hamas fighters it believes have been killed. The most recent was Netanyahu’s estimate of 14,000.

Israeli security officials say such estimates are reached through a combination of counting bodies on the battlefield, intercepts of Hamas communications and intelligence assessments of personnel in targets that were destroyed.

Hamas has said Israeli estimates for its losses are exaggerated but has not said how many of its fighters have been killed.

The Palestinian Health Ministry says more than 70% of the dead are women and children. For most of the conflict its figures showed children as representing slightly over 40% of all those killed.

However, conditions in hospitals compiling figures have worsened amid the fighting and many of those killed may not be identifiable due to their injuries.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Palestinian Territories:

Hamas on Thursday called for an end to airdrops of aid after two Palestinians were killed in northern Gaza when a aid pallet crashed into a warehouse after its parachute failed to open.

Several countries, including the United States, Britain and France, have resorted to regular aid airdrops in northern Gaza, where humanitarian agencies have warned of a looming famine.

On Tuesday, two people died when an aid parachute fell on the roof of a warehouse where residents had gathered to collect relief supplies.

The latest fatalities take to at least 21 the number of people killed when airdrops of aid have gone disastrously wrong, according to the Hamas authorities.

“We reiterate that airdrops pose a real danger to the lives of citizens and do not provide a real solution to alleviate the food crisis plaguing northern Gaza,” Salama Marouf, head of the government’s media office in Gaza, said in a statement.

“We call for an immediate halt to the delivery of aid in this ineffective and erroneous manner, and we call for the full activation of the land crossings to deliver humanitarian aid to northern Gaza.”

With only a trickle of aid reaching the starving north and the United Nations warning of “imminent famine”, foreign governments have turned to airdrops to get aid into the territory.

Aid agencies say the situation has deteriorated this week after Israeli forces closed the Rafah border crossing with Egypt after taking control of it.

Relief also has not been transferred into Gaza through the other main crossing between Israel and the Palestinian territory, Kerem Shalom, after it came under rocket fire three times since Sunday.

Meanwhile, a US container ship loaded with aid for Gaza left Cyprus Thursday in a new test of a maritime corridor to get relief into the besieged territory.

The US-flagged MV Sagamore left the port of Larnaca after being loaded with aid from Britain, Cyprus and the United States, Cyprus government spokesperson Yiannis Antoniou told the official CNA news agency.

US military engineers have been assembling a temporary pier for installation on the Gaza coast to unload maritime aid deliveries.

UN agencies and humanitarian aid groups have warned that maritime deliveries and airdrops cannot deliver aid in the quantities needed to avert acute food shortages for the 2.4 million people across Gaza.

Gaza has been devastated by the war which started with Hamas’s October 7 attack on southern Israel that resulted in the deaths of about 1,170 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.

Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed at least 34,904 people in Gaza, mostly women and children, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

U.S. President Joe Biden speaks to the press onboard of Air Force One en route from Israel, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, at Ramstein Air Base, Germany, on October 18, 2023.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

U.S. President Joe Biden on Wednesday said Egypt’s president has agreed to open a border crossing into Gaza to allow in 20 trucks with humanitarian aid.

Mr. Biden said he spoke with Egypt President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi after his visit to Israel, where leaders there agreed to allow the aid in.

Israel sealed off the Gaza Strip, stopping all entry of food, water, medicine, and fuel to its 2.3 million people following the Hamas attack on October 7.

White House officials said the aid would flow in the coming days. Mr. Biden said if Hamas confiscates the aid, “it will end”.

New Delhi:

Over a thousand killed, buildings destroyed and entire neighbourhoods reduced to rubble – the war in Israel between security forces and Hamas group operatives has had global implications. 

Many countries, including the US, UK, France and Germany, have heightened security around “potential Jewish targets” and “pro-Palestinian protesters”.

Here’s how the war has impacted security around the world: 

United States

Cities across the country, including New York, Los Angeles, Miami, and Houston, heightened security around synagogues in response to a Palestinian solidarity rally in Manhattan on Sunday. A thousand demonstrators gathered in solidarity with Palestinians, while a few hundred pro-Israel protesters counter-demonstrated.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul denounced the Palestinian solidarity rally as “despicable and morally reprehensible” and directed state landmarks, including the World Trade Center and Niagara Falls, to be illuminated in blue and white – the colours of the Isreli flag. 

United Kingdom

The Scotland Yard has stepped up patrols across London in response to several incidents on social media related to the ongoing conflict in Israel.

The Metropolitan Police condemned the “glorification” of Hamas’s terrorist activities and warned against hate crimes in a statement on Saturday night, following one of the biggest escalations of conflict in the Middle East in decades.

“We are aware of a number of incidents, including those that have been shared on social media, in relation to the ongoing conflict in Israel and the border with Gaza,” the Met Police said in a statement.

“The Met has increased policing patrols across parts of London in order to provide a visible presence and reassurance to our communities. We remain in contact with partners and community leaders to listen to any concerns,” it added.

France

In France, security at synagogues in the cities of Paris, Marseille, Lyon, and Strasbourg had been heightened since late September due to religious holidays.

French authorities ramped up security at Jewish temples and schools across the country, after a Jewish leader warned that the conflict could spill over the country.

France has the largest Jewish population in Europe and the third-largest in the world, with an estimated 500,000 people.French authorities announced that a pro-Palestinian rally scheduled for Monday evening in Lyon would be banned due to the potential for public disorder.

Germany

Germany increased police security at Jewish and Israeli institutions after Palestinian supporters celebrated the attack in the streets of Berlin. The Berlin police shared photos on social media of people celebrating Israel’s attacks with sweet gestures.

German authorities have said they are closely monitoring “potential Hamas supporters” in Islamist circles.

“In Berlin, police protection has been immediately stepped up,” Interior Minister Nancy Faeser told Bild newspaper. “The federal government and the regions are closely coordinating their actions.”

Canada

Thousands of people in Montreal rallied in support of the Palestinian people on Saturday, holding “free Palestine” posters, waving Palestinian flags, and calling for boycotting Israel.

The Canadian police have stepped up security cover in sensitive areas, especially around synagogues. 

“We are also reaching out to community partners to ensure they know we are here to support them,” an Ottawa Police statement said. “Hate Crimes will not be tolerated and will be fully investigated.”

Middle East 

In Iran, large crowds gathered in major cities, such as Palestine Square in Tehran, waving Palestinian flags and cheering Hamas’s offensive, which they called “Al-Aqsa Flood.” Some billboards in the capital even proclaimed, “The great liberation operation has begun.”

In Lebanon, Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Shi’ite group, held a rally in Beirut to express support for Hamas. During the rally, participants chanted “Death to Israel.” Hezbollah also claimed to have fired on Israeli positions in the contested Shebaa Farms border area.

In Iraq, pro-Palestinian protests erupted, with demonstrators burning Israeli flags and chanting anti-American slogans. The demonstrators stamped on and set fire to Israeli flags chanting “No to America, No to Israel”.