The four countries that brokered Gaza's ceasefire — Egypt, Qatar, Turkey and the United States — are holding talks this week on putting the deal's second phase into effect, while the first phase's hardest promise is still being dug out of the rubble. Hamas says it has begun searching new areas of the Strip, alongside Egyptian experts and heavy machinery, for the bodies of the 13 Israeli hostages who remain in Gaza.
The centrepiece meeting came in Cairo on Tuesday, when Turkey's intelligence chief Ibrahim Kalin sat down with Qatar's prime minister and foreign minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, and Egypt's intelligence chief Hassan Rashad. A Turkish security official said the three discussed advancing to the second phase of the agreement and stepping up joint efforts with the United States to strengthen the truce, and agreed to deepen cooperation with the Civil-Military Coordination Centre that monitors the ceasefire, to remove obstacles and prevent violations. A Hamas delegation led by the group's Gaza chief, Khalil al-Hayya, has also been in Cairo this week, meeting Egyptian and Qatari mediators on following up the ceasefire and on the technocratic body meant to run Gaza in the next phase.
On the ground, the search widened first. Egypt sent a team of experts with heavy equipment — an excavator and bulldozers — into Gaza on Saturday. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office approved the deployment and described it as purely technical: "They are only going in to locate the hostages." Israel's Channel 13 reported that Qatar has supplied engineering equipment for the effort. On Sunday, al-Hayya said Hamas had begun searching new areas for the bodies of the remaining 13 hostages, and the work was still going on Tuesday in Khan Younis, in the south, and in Nuseirat, in the centre of the Strip, with residents watching the machinery claw through sand and rubble beside shattered buildings.
The arithmetic of the first phase is stark. Of the 28 dead hostages Hamas was required to hand back, 15 have been returned since the ceasefire took effect on October 10 — and 13 have not. All 20 living hostages came home, and Israel freed roughly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners. Running the other way, Israel returns 15 Palestinian bodies for every hostage's remains, and has handed over 195 so far, fewer than half of them identified by their families, according to Gaza's Health Ministry.
This week also brought the deal's ugliest dispute so far. Remains Hamas handed over on Monday night were identified in Israel as part of the body of Ofir Tzarfati, who was kidnapped from the Nova music festival on October 7, 2023, and whose body Israeli troops had already recovered almost two years ago. Netanyahu called the handover a "clear violation" of the agreement and convened his top security officials on Tuesday to weigh Israel's response, with expanding the "Yellow Line" — the line to which Israeli forces pulled back — among the options reported to be on the table. Opposition leader Benny Gantz demanded that Hamas's violations "cannot remain without a harsh response." Hamas spokesman Hazem Qassem denied Israel's charge that the group knows where the bodies are and is holding them back, saying the scale of the destruction has buried them beyond easy reach, and insisted Hamas remains committed to the first phase. Israeli officials counter that Hamas knows the location of most of the 13 and could return more of them now. President Trump, in a social media post reported this week, gave Hamas 48 hours to return the remains, without saying what would follow.
What the second phase would settle is everything the first phase left open: how far Israeli forces withdraw, whether and how Hamas gives up its weapons, who governs Gaza day to day, and who pays to rebuild it. Under President Trump's 20-point plan, the phase pairs further Israeli pullbacks with Hamas's disarmament and the demilitarisation of the Strip, an international stabilisation force deployed inside Gaza, and a committee of Palestinian technocrats administering the territory under international oversight. Netanyahu has been blunt about Israel's order of priorities — the next phase, he has said, is disarming Hamas and demilitarising Gaza, not reconstruction — and Israel insists it will decide which foreign troops are allowed to enter the Strip at all.
Washington is pushing the timetable. Envoy Steve Witkoff and adviser Jared Kushner met Netanyahu in Jerusalem on Monday, and Vice President JD Vance followed on Tuesday and Wednesday, publicly working to ease Israeli concerns about where the plan leads. Vance acknowledged "huge hurdles" on the road to a lasting peace and said officials are still brainstorming the makeup of the international force, naming Turkey and Indonesia as countries expected to contribute troops — a force some in Israel fear could tie the army's hands if it judges that a threat remains in Gaza.
For ordinary people, the talks and the digging are the same story. Thirteen Israeli families are still waiting to bury their dead, and until the last body comes home, Israel treats the first phase as unfinished. Gaza's residents are waiting on the second phase for the decisions that shape daily life: whether soldiers pull further back, whether anyone new polices their streets, who runs their towns, and whether rebuilding their flattened neighbourhoods can finally begin. This week's meetings in Cairo and Jerusalem will show whether the ceasefire's paperwork can catch up with its promises.
📰 ProfiloPolitics Member News — choose your news, share it, earn credit
Members choose the news they want — share it and earn credit.
📣 Join ProfiloPolitics on Telegram — breaking news first
Follow @profilopoliticsnews for every update on this story.