As a truce took hold on Sunday in Gaza, potentially ending the longest and deadliest war in a century of Israeli-Palestinian conflict, two men used the same metaphor to describe how they felt.
“The weight on my chest has lifted,” said Ziad Obeid, a Gazan civil servant displaced several times during the war. “We have survived.”
“The rock lying on my heart has been removed,” said Dov Weissglas, a former Israeli politician. “We want to see the hostages home, period.”
Both men also had a “but.”
Mr. Obeid has not seen his damaged house in northern Gaza for more than a year. How bad, he wondered, is the damage? Who will rebuild a decimated Gaza? And will Hamas still run it?
Mr. Weissglas worried about the conditions of the hostages set to be freed gradually over the next few weeks from dank quarters in the territory. And he grimaced about exchanging them for hundreds of Palestinian detainees, many of whom are serving life sentences for attacks on Israelis. “There is relief,” he said, “wrapped in caution, fears and concern.”
It was an apt summary of the mood on both sides of the divide on Sunday, as Israelis and Palestinians expressed feelings of elation tinged with doubt.
For Palestinians, the truce is meant to provide at least six weeks without strikes on Gaza. That offers a window for Gazans to take tentative first steps toward reconstruction; to find relatives still buried in the rubble; and to come to terms with the killing of more than 45,000 people, both civilians and combatants, whose bodies have already been counted by the Gazan health authorities. Scenes of joy were broadcast on Sunday from across the territory, as rescue workers threw confetti; crowds danced and chanted amid the rubble; and journalists symbolically removed their flak jackets.
For Israelis, the deal allows for the gradual release of at least 33 of the hostages captured during Hamas’s raid on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 — an attack that killed up to 1,200 people and provoked Israel’s devastating 15-month response. For the hostages released alive, that means freedom after 470 days of captivity. For Israelis at large, many of them wracked by a form of survivors’ guilt, it offers qualified catharsis. In the embodiment of that mood, friends of one of the first three hostages released on Sunday were filmed leaping with jubilation after hearing news of her freedom.
But the details of the deal between Israel and Hamas mean that both sides still face considerable uncertainty about how the next six weeks will play out, let alone about whether the tentative arrangement will later become permanent. Even the first phase started hours behind schedule on Sunday morning, amid disputes about which hostages would be released in the afternoon. In that time, according to the Gazan authorities, Israeli strikes killed and wounded yet more people.
For now, Israel also still controls vast tracts of Gaza and has yet to agree to a full withdrawal, preventing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, like Mr. Obeid, from returning to homes in northern Gaza. It remains to be seen whether Israeli troops will ever entirely leave.
“What happens after 42 days?” Mr. Weissglas said. “Nobody knows.”
Palestinians also remain unclear about the fates of several thousand Gazans detained incommunicado during the war and who may not be released during the upcoming exchanges. Reema Diab, a housewife in central Gaza, still has no way of locating her husband, a horse trainer, who she said was taken for interrogation in Israel in December 2023 and never heard from since.
“I’m relieved the bloodshed is coming to an end, but my heart aches,” Ms. Diab said. “His absence is unimaginable.”
Across the border, Israeli columnists struck a somber tone, with one, Ben Caspit, describing a blend of joy and sadness, “inseparably intertwined.” He wrote that Sunday was a day of reckoning, not celebration, and he emphasized that Israel would now need to come to terms with the scale of its failure on Oct. 7, 2023.
“Let us be silent for a moment, let us study our conscience, let us suffer the disaster, let us think about those who were killed and murdered and burned and raped and kidnapped,” Mr. Caspit wrote in Maariv, a right-leaning daily newspaper.
Israelis also feared already for the fates of some 65 hostages who may not be released from Gaza if the deal collapses after six weeks. Similarly, there were widespread fears that the initial 33 hostages set to be released over the next 42 days may be emotionally or physically scarred, or even dead. And Israelis generally lamented that the hostages’ freedom would be obtained in exchange for Palestinian detainees, including some convicted of major terrorist attacks as well as teenagers who have never been charged.
Palestinians see the soon-to-be released detainees as freedom fighters and political prisoners. For Israelis, it will be a psychological blow to see “this stream of murderers being released,” Mr. Weissglas said.
Videos of Hamas fighters re-emerging in triumph from hiding were also a gut-punch for Israelis, who had hoped the war would completely destroy the group’s military abilities. For many Gazans, it was a sight to be celebrated, but for others, it was a reminder of lingering uncertainty about Gaza’s future governance.
Mr. Obeid works for the Palestinian Authority, which lost power to Hamas in Gaza 18 years ago but still employs some Gazan civil servants, including Mr. Obeid, and now hopes to play a bigger role in postwar Gaza. Mr. Obeid said he had been liaising in recent days with the authority’s leaders in the West Bank to plan potential cleanup and reconstruction operations in Gaza. It is unclear, he said, whether those efforts will be possible with Hamas still in charge over the next six weeks, and perhaps even beyond.
It is also unclear when Israel will allow Mr. Obeid, who fled to Egypt last year after being displaced three times in Gaza, to return home.
But all of that can be addressed in time, Mr. Obeid said.
For now, he said, “I can breathe oxygen again.”
Bilal Shbair contributed reporting from Deir al Balah, Gaza Strip, and Aaron Boxerman from Jerusalem.
