The first three Israeli hostages to be released under a cease-fire deal in the Gaza Strip were turned over by Hamas on Sunday, beginning a drawn-out process that will see 33 captives freed over the next six weeks in exchange for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners.


The cease-fire in Israel’s war with Hamas went into effect earlier in the day, clearing the way for the women’s release. The fragile truce pauses a 15-month war that has been among the deadliest in modern Middle East history, killing 46,000 Palestinians and reducing much of the strip to ruins following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel that killed about 1,200 people and seized about 250 hostages.

Displaced Palestinians react as they make their way to return to their homes before a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas takes effect, in Gaza City, January 19, 2025. REUTERS/Dawoud Abu Alkas

If it holds, the cease-fire also could ease tensions in the region after more than a year of a conflict that drew in the U.S., Iran and Tehran’s allied militias across the Middle East, including the first direct exchanges of fire between Israel and Iran and an Israeli offensive against Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement last year.

Chaos unfurled during the handover, underscoring the difficulties ahead for the agreement. Hamas drove the three women to a public square in Gaza where throngs of people surrounded the vehicles. Hamas gunmen then pushed back crowds of young men as the hostages were handed to the International Committee of the Red Cross, which drove them to the Israeli military.

As Israeli television broadcast the first images of the women, cheers erupted across a plaza in central Tel Aviv dubbed Hostage Square, where hundreds of Israelis gathered to watch their release after more than 470 days in captivity in Gaza.

“I want to cry, cry, cry with all my heart. I can’t imagine how their mothers feel right now,” said Rachel Rotem, 80, who joined hundreds of Israelis in Hostage Square. “I had to be here when they were released,” she said.

The three women are Romi Gonen, a 24-year-old waitress who was taken from the Nova music festival in southern Israel; Doron Steinbrecher, 31, an Israeli-Romanian citizen and veterinary nurse who was kidnapped from her home in kibbutz Kfar Aza; and Emily Tehila Damari, 28, a British-Israeli citizen who was also taken from her home in Kfar Aza.

A combination image shows a woman holding a cutout picture of British-Israeli hostage Emily Damari, in Tel Aviv, Israel March 14, 2024 (L) and undated handout images of Israeli hostage Doron Steinbrecher (C) and Israeli hostage Romi Gonen (R), who were kidnapped during the deadly October 7, 2023 attack by Hamas. REUTERS/Tomer Appelbaum, Courtesy of Bring Them Home Now/Handout via REUTERS, Gonen Family/Handout via REUTERS

The halt in fighting was delayed by about three hours Sunday morning after Hamas failed to hand over the names of hostages it planned to release by the time the agreement was originally meant to come into effect, highlighting the challenges in implementing an agreement between two bitterly opposed sides.

Israel’s prison service said Sunday that it had received the list of Palestinian prisoners to be freed and was preparing for their release.

Hostilities continued Sunday morning during the delay, with the Israeli military launching artillery and airstrikes on a number of targets in northern and central Gaza. The Palestinian health ministry in Gaza said Sunday that 14 people had been killed by Israeli strikes over the last 24 hours, without specifying whether any were combatants.

Israel and Hamas have agreed to a multistage deal that would begin with a pause in fighting during which Hamas would release hostages still held in Gaza in exchange for Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jail. Talks would begin later on a permanent end to the fighting—which is expected to be a more contentious debate.

While polls show most Israelis support halting the war for the release of hostages, some of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right allies oppose an end to the war and have left or threatened to leave the government if the deal proceeds to the next stage.

Highlighting the challenges, Hamas used the cease-fire to claim a victory in a war that Netanyahu has repeatedly said was aimed at totally destroying the armed group as the political and military power in Gaza.

Masked men wearing the green headbands of Hamas’s armed wing, the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, appeared in the streets in several locations in central and southern Gaza flashing the two-fingered victory signal and waving assault rifles in the air.

Palestinian Hamas militants hand over hostages kidnapped during the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel by Hamas, to members of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) as part of a ceasefire and a hostages-prisoners swap deal between Hamas and Israel, in Gaza City, January 19, 2025 in this screen grab from a video. REUTERS/via Reuters TV TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY

“We forced the Zionist occupation to cease its aggression against our people and to withdraw,” Hamas said on its official website.

Israel and Hamas accepted the agreement last week after months of U.S.-led diplomacy, spurred on by geopolitical shifts in the region wrought by war and unusual partnership between the Biden administration and the incoming Trump administration, who worked together along with mediators from Egypt and Qatar to complete the deal.

Four more hostages should be released next weekend, and another 26 spread out over the following five weeks in the first part of the multiphase deal.

Israel says 94 hostages taken on Oct. 7, 2023, remain in Gaza, most of them Israeli. They include more than 30 hostages who Israel has concluded are no longer alive, based on intelligence, but Israeli and U.S. officials privately believe the number of dead is much higher. Three additional hostages, taken before the Hamas-led attack, bring the total to 97.

Around the same time as the hostage return Sunday, the first batch of around 90 Palestinian prisoners will be released and transferred by Israeli security forces to either the occupied West Bank or Gaza. More than 1,700 prisoners are set to be freed throughout the deal.

Israeli soldiers and members of the Red Cross gather near the Israeli military prison, Ofer, on the day Israel releases Palestinian prisoners as part of a hostages-prisoners swap and a ceasefire deal in Gaza between Hamas and Israel, near Ramallah in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, January 19, 2025. REUTERS/Sinan Abu Mayzer

The cease-fire brings relief to the two million people living in Gaza, where Israeli bombing and the fighting with Hamas militants has reduced much of the strip to rubble and uprooted most people from their homes, with many Gazans fleeing multiple times and now living in tents in displacement camps.

“For almost a year and half we have been facing death every second, every minute, every day, but I believe it is time for this war to end,” said Fatima Majdi Hamouda, a woman from Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip who, like thousands of others, fled to southern Gaza in following an Israeli evacuation order in the early days of the war.

Displaced Palestinians make their way past rubble, as they attempt to return to their homes, following a delay in the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas over the hostage list, in the northern Gaza Strip January 19, 2025. REUTERS/Khalil Ramzi

Television footage showed hundreds of Palestinian families streaming past bombed-out buildings into one neighborhood of Gaza City on Sunday, heading toward homes they left earlier in the war.

A mourner sits next to the body of a Palestinian killed in an Israeli strike, following a delay in the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas over the hostage list, in Gaza City, January 19, 2025. REUTERS/Mahmoud Issa

“The nightmare is over,” said Nasser Qassem, a 38-year-old who fled Gaza City with his three children.

A displaced Palestinian makes his way past rubble, as Palestinians attempt to return to their homes, following a delay in the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas over the hostage list, in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip January 19, 2025. REUTERS/Hatem Khaled

The deal, announced last week by President Biden and the prime minister of Qatar, is only the second pause in fighting since the war began. A weeklong truce in November 2023 collapsed after that deal freed more than a hundred hostages and more than 200 Palestinian prisoners.

The path to ending the Gaza war is uncertain. The deal that went into effect on Sunday calls for the two sides to negotiate the terms of a permanent cease-fire in the coming weeks during the initial phase of agreement. Many issues still divide Israel and Hamas, including the final lists of Palestinian prisoners who would be freed in return for the hostages, and the timing and extent of the Israeli military’s withdrawal from Gaza.

One or both sides could find reason to exit from the deal before reaching an agreement to end the war. Netanyahu faces opposition to ending the conflict from important members of his government. Hamas could also back out if its leaders decide that its demands haven’t been met in terms of the release of prominent Palestinian prisoners or for a broad Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.

Meanwhile, aid groups are preparing to use the cease-fire to increase deliveries into the besieged territory, where much of the population faces extreme hunger, disease and the winter elements in vast tent cities. The deal calls for 600 trucks of aid to enter Gaza each day and an easing of restrictions on the movement of aid workers inside the strip.

Write to Jared Malsin at jared.malsin@wsj.com and Anat Peled at anat.peled@wsj.com