What’s behind the uneven exchange of Israeli hostages for Palestinian prisoners?

The scenes embodied the bittersweet emotions felt on either side of the Israel-Gaza border. Palestinians celebrated Israel’s release of 90 Palestinian prisoners early Monday, hours after Hamas freed three Israeli hostages in Gaza, setting off joyous reunions with their families. The exchange capped the first of what is hoped will be a series of weekly hostage-for-prisoner swaps over the next six weeks.

As the truce came into effect on Sunday, celebrations replaced explosions and hundreds of humanitarian aid trucks began rolling into Gaza. The three hostages returned to jubilant embraces with relatives and friends at an Israeli hospital, while fireworks and cheering crowds greeted the newly freed Palestinian prisoners in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

But the joy was shadowed by uncertainty and expectations of prolonged hardship to come, with no comprehensive plan in place for how Gaza will be rebuilt. Gazans returning to Rafah, a southern city, found it mostly flattened by fighting; the mayor said that 60 percent of homes had been destroyed and 70 percent of the city’s sewage system.

And after months of restrictions and lawlessness in Gaza that reduced humanitarian aid to a trickle, aid agencies have warned that they need unimpeded access for supplies to reach those in need.

In Israel, little was announced about the health of the hostages released on Sunday, while nothing is known about the identities of four hostages expected to be freed next weekend in exchange for additional Palestinian prisoners. If the deal holds, 33 of the roughly 100 remaining hostages still in Gaza, living and dead, and more than 1,000 imprisoned Palestinians held in Israel will be released over the first six weeks of the cease-fire. But the fate of more than 60 other hostages and thousands of other Palestinian detainees depends on the deal’s extension.

“This is a moment of tremendous hope — fragile, yet vital,” Tom Fletcher, the United Nations undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs, said on social media.

Here’s what else to know:

• Trump inauguration: Some officials have suggested that a looming deadline helped close the gap to reaching a cease-fire deal after months of sputtering talks: President-elect Donald J. Trump’s inauguration on Monday. That deadline helped negotiators put pressure on both Israel and Hamas to accelerate their decision-making after months of agonizing delay.

• Hostage and prisoner releases: One aspect of the cease-fire agreement was strikingly lopsided: the number of Israeli hostages released compared with the number of freed Palestinian prisoners. Further exchanges will likely follow a similar formula.

• Hamas projects strength: Armed Hamas fighters returned to the streets of Gaza on Sunday. The Hamas-run police force, whose uniformed officers had all but disappeared to avoid Israeli attacks, said that it was deploying personnel across the territory to “preserve security and order.”.

• Gaza’s destruction: The cease-fire halted a 470-day conflict that has killed more than 46,000 Palestinians and injured more than 110,000 others, according to the Gaza health ministry, which does not distinguish between combatants and civilians. Many of Gaza’s roughly two million people have been displaced at least once by the war.

But in the email dated Sunday and sent by a Houthi-linked group that communicates with the shipping industry, the Houthis warned that if the United States or Britain directly attacked Yemen, they would resume their assaults on vessels associated with these countries.

A military spokesman for the Houthis, Yahya Saree, said that another statement was planned for later Monday, which was expected to elaborate on the decision.

Since November 2023, the Houthis have been launching missiles at Israel and targeting commercial vessels they believe are headed for Israel, in what they say is a show of solidarity with Hamas, their Iran-backed ally in Gaza.

The attacks have severely disrupted global shipping trade through the Red Sea, a key route for traffic between Europe, Asia and the Middle East. Many shipping companies have rerouted their cargo around the Cape of Good Hope, located at the southern tip of Africa. This alternative path has added approximately 4,000 miles and 10 additional days to shipping journeys, requiring significantly more fuel.

Images and video released by the Israeli government showed the former captives, all young women, walking under their own power and embracing relatives, but no details have been made public yet about their condition or what they endured.

Hostages who have been released previously have described a wide range of experiences that have taken physical and psychological tolls on them. Here is what some have said:

• Andrey Kozlov was one of four captives rescued in an Israeli military operation in June. He was held for eight months along with two other hostages, and was moved to six locations in the first two months — sometimes with only a pail for a toilet and scarce food — while shackled at the wrists and ankles. For the next six months, Mr. Kozlov, 27, and the two others were kept in the apartment of a Hamas operative. There, they were unshackled and ate regularly, Mr. Kozlov said, but they were psychologically abused and threatened. Mr. Kozlov, a Russian Israeli, said he focused on surviving by reciting mantras to himself in Russian, such as “You are alive; every day a gift.”

• Amit Soussana, a lawyer abducted from her home in Kibbutz Kfar Azza, was the first Israeli hostage to speak publicly about being sexually assaulted during captivity. She said she was held alone in a child’s bedroom, chained by her left ankle. Sometimes a guard would enter, sit beside her on the bed and touch her, and weeks into her captivity, she was forced at gunpoint to engage with him sexually, she said. Ms. Soussana, then 40, was later moved to another location, where she said different captors beat her. She was released as part of the first cease-fire agreement in November 2023.

• Chen Goldstein-Almog was abducted along with three of her children from Kibbutz Kfar Aza, while her husband and eldest daughter were killed in the Hamas-led attack of Oct. 7, 2023. Ms. Goldstein-Almog, who was 48 at the time, later said that she and the children were treated “respectfully” and were not physically harmed. Even so, she said, “We were in daily danger. It was fear at a level we didn’t know existed.”

• Ofelia Adit Roitman, who was 77 when she was kidnapped from Kibbutz Nir Oz, described her captivity in a video statement shortly after she was released in the previous cease-fire. “I was very scared the first two weeks,” Ms. Roitman said. “I thought I was crazy because I was alone. There was barely any light. There was barely any food.”

• Mia Schem was shot and taken hostage after fleeing the Nova music festival. Released as part of the 2023 cease-fire, she described her experience to Israeli news media, saying she underwent surgery for her gunshot wound in her first days in Gaza, but received no painkillers afterward and had to replace her own bandages. Ms. Schem, then 21, was held by a family that sometimes withheld food from her for entire days, even as they ate, she said.

• Margalit Moses, who was 78 when she was taken, said she spoke to her captors in Arabic, serving as an interpreter for a group of hostages in poor health who were held together. She was released as part of the last cease-fire and invited her guards for coffee “when peace comes” as she left. After she was freed, she realized she had actually been relatively fortunate. “Now that I’ve heard the horror stories of those who came back,” she said, “I understand I was kept in conditions others did not have.”

“People can barely recognize the crushed places where they used to live,” Mr. Bahja said.

In video footage shared with The New York Times, Mr. Bahja, wearing a blue jacket, hurried through the streets with his son ِAlhassan, 21. They walked past piles of rubble that loomed on either side, some of which used to be houses belonging to their neighbors.

“This is Fahmy Abu Warda’s home, this is Abu-Shaaban’s home,” ِAlhassan can be heard saying in the video, as the camera records mounds of collapsed cement and metal.

Eventually, the two reached their former home. When they had left Jabaliya three months ago, it was mostly intact. Now, it was destroyed.

Mr. Bahja clambered onto what remained of the roof to look out over the devastated landscape.

As night fell, they headed back on foot for the apartment in Gaza City where they have been sheltering for the past three months.

Like some Gazans, Mr. Bahja no longer sees a future for his family in the Palestinian enclave. The trauma of 15 months of war — as well as uncertainty over the future — has just been too much, he said.

“My family and I are now waiting for the border to open so we can get out of this country,” he said. “We have gone through difficult things and we need to heal from what we’ve seen.”

It appeared to represent the highest daily total of aid trucks to have reached Gaza since the start of the war. In recent months, fewer than 100 trucks per day had been entering the enclave, and deliveries had at times been suspended.

Mousa Abu Marzouk, a senior Hamas official, confirmed in a phone interview that the six Thai workers were in Gaza and said that the militant group had informed mediators. “We will be speaking about this issue, but there’s nothing new to tell you,” he said.

Such an uneven swap is not unusual. Israeli governments have long been determined to bring back captured civilians and soldiers, including dead ones, even at steep costs. The terms of such trades have often prompted fierce criticism domestically, much as a hostage release deal in November 2023 — part of an earlier cease-fire — did within Israel’s governing coalition.

The exchange of civilian hostages for prisoners, including some whom Israel has accused of terrorism, has also raised the ire of some Israelis. In a statement celebrating the release of the three Israeli hostages on Sunday, an Israeli military spokesman, Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, hinted at some of that underlying frustration, saying the latest trade was not “a true like-for-like exchange.”

Two of the women were abducted from their homes and one from a music festival, and “then brutally held since,” he said. “This is a huge difference when compared to the terrorists who are being released.”

Hamas officials have said one of the objectives of the group’s Oct. 7, 2023 attack in Israel was to win the release of some of the thousands of Palestinians jailed in Israel, many of them accused of violence against Israeli soldiers and civilians. Many Palestinians say such violence is legitimate resistance to Israel’s decades-long occupation of the West Bank and repeated military campaigns in Gaza. And many are also critical of Israel’s justice system, which they say falsely imprisons some Palestinians, including women and children.

During the last pause in the war in November 2023, Israel released 240 Palestinian prisoners and detainees in exchange for hostages. The majority of the prisoners released had not been convicted of a crime, and nearly half were under 18.

Many Palestinians are prosecuted in Israeli military courts, which try them in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Nearly every Palestinian who is tried in the military courts is convicted. But many Palestinian prisoners are never even tried. Instead, Israel detains them indefinitely without charges and based on secret evidence, under what is called administrative detention.

Yahya Sinwar, the former political chief of Hamas, who was an architect of the Oct. 7, 2023 attack that ignited the war, was intimately familiar with the formulas Israel has accepted in previous exchanges. He had spent years in an Israeli prison but was released in October 2011 along with more than 1,000 others as part of an exchange for Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier captured by Hamas in a cross-border raid in 2006.

Upon his release in 2011, Mr. Sinwar pledged “to work hard to free all prisoners, especially those who serve high sentences, whatever the price.” At the time, the lopsided trade raised questions of whether the exchange would encourage more abductions of Israelis.

Israeli troops killed Mr. Sinwar three months ago in fighting in Gaza.

There were also earlier precedents for uneven trades. In 2003, the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah exchanged a kidnapped former Israeli colonel and the bodies of three Israeli soldiers killed during a cross-border raid for more than 400 prisoners held in Israel and nearly 60 bodies.

Almost two decades earlier, in 1985, the Israeli government traded more than 1,100 prisoners — including some convicted of perpetrating or masterminding attacks on Israelis — for three Israeli soldiers captured during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Some of the released prisoners eventually became senior militant leaders.

During the last cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hamas, a one-week truce in November 2023, Israel released roughly three prisoners — women and minors — for each hostage returned to Israel. Ultimately, Hamas freed about 100 hostages — including more than 20 who were not Israeli and were not included in the deal with Israel — in exchange for about 240 prisoners held by Israel.

The ratio frustrated some critics in Israel, including some relatives of hostages, while other captives’ family members have demanded that Israel pay any price to bring people back. When Israeli soldiers accidentally killed three hostages in Gaza who had escaped their captors, Itzik Horn, whose adult sons were abducted from Kibbutz Nir Oz, said Israel must immediately reach a deal to free all the captives, even if it means releasing Palestinians held in Israeli jails on terrorism charges.

“Let them free all the Palestinian prisoners we have here, all the terrorists — what do I care?” Mr. Horn said more than a year ago. “The most important thing isn’t to defeat Hamas. The only victory here is to bring back all the hostages.” Mr. Horn’s sons are still being held captive.

The families of hostages are split over this and other issues; a small minority have opposed a deal. The Tikva Forum, an Israeli group representing some captives’ families, opposed the latest cease-fire agreement. In a statement on Wednesday, when news of the deal emerged, the group said in a statement on social media that it objected to an agreement with Hamas, which it called “a terror organization that should be destroyed.”

“This deal leaves dozens of hostages behind in Gaza,” the group said. “It also sets the stage for the next massacre and future kidnappings of Israelis.”

“They’re conveying that Hamas must be a part of any future arrangements, or at least, be coordinated with,” he added.

On Sunday, the Hamas-run government media office announced that thousands of police officers were beginning to deploy throughout the territory to “preserve security and order.” Government ministries and institutions, the media office said, were prepared to start working “according to the government plan to implement all the measures that guarantee bringing back normal life.”

At the Nasser Medical Complex in the southern city of Khan Younis, at least three uniformed police officers were standing as the Palestinian national anthem played in the background, according to a video posted on social media and verified by The New York Times.

Later on Sunday, dozens of uniformed, gun-toting Hamas militants were seen in Saraya Square in Gaza City next to a car holding Israeli hostages before they were handed over to the Red Cross. The militants were attempting to push away crowds of people pressing toward the car.

Even as Hamas attempts to project that it still controls Gaza and plans to play a key role in its administration, its future there remains uncertain. Israeli officials have said they have not given up on their stated war goal of dismantling Hamas’s military wing and government, strongly suggesting that they could resume the war against the militant group after the freeing of some hostages.

Gideon Saar, the Israeli foreign minister, said on Sunday that Hamas’s rule was dangerous for Israel’s security and emphasized that Israel had not agreed to a permanent cease-fire that leaves Hamas in power.

“We are determined to achieve the objectives of the war,” he said.

While some analysts say Israel could eventually remove Hamas from power, others say it would struggle to resume the war in the face of international pressure. And even if it does, those analysts say, Israeli forces will face immense challenges in uprooting Hamas from Gaza without carrying out a direct occupation.

Ali Jarbawi, a political science professor at Birzeit University, said Hamas’s parades through Gaza on Sunday were more than a message to the international community that it was in control. They also reflect the reality on the ground, he said.

“Hamas was there before the war and they’re there now,” he said.

Aritz Parra contributed reporting.

Israeli leaders have long insisted that they will not end the war until Hamas is destroyed. That appeared far from reality on Sunday as Hamas militants, some waving rifles, fanned out in parts of Gaza in pickup trucks, in a show of authority to Palestinians and Israelis alike.

Israel and Hamas have both preserved some of their bargaining chips. At the end of the 42-day truce, Hamas will still have around two-thirds of the 98 remaining hostages, including dozens who are believed to be dead. And Israel will still occupy parts of Gaza, and hold major prisoners, including Marwan Barghouti, a militant leader and iconic Palestinian political figure.

But as part of the talks, the Israeli government will then probably have to decide whether it is willing to choose one of its war aims, bringing home the hostages, over another, destroying Hamas. And choosing the hostages might threaten Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s grip on power in Israel.

In the meantime, both sides have agreed to postpone a decisive agreement as to the war’s end and the future of Gaza, and hope the 42-day cease-fire will play to their advantage, said Shlomo Brom, a retired Israeli brigadier general. Hamas, in particular, “hopes that the new dynamic will prevent Israel from returning to fighting,” he said.

The decision to accept a temporary cease-fire opened deep fissures within Mr. Netanyahu’s governing coalition, which is stacked with hard-liners. Itamar Ben-Gvir, the far-right national security minister, resigned in protest from the cabinet and withdrew his Jewish Power party from the coalition on Sunday.

The Religious Zionism party, led by Bezalel Smotrich, threatened to bolt the coalition, too, if Mr. Netanyahu failed to renew the fighting after the end of the 42-day truce. If Mr. Smotrich’s party also left, Mr. Netanyahu’s government would hold fewer than half of the seats in the Knesset, Israel’s Parliament, which could cause the government to fall and force new elections.

On Saturday night, Mr. Netanyahu stressed that the cease-fire was temporary for now. He argued that Israel retained the right to return to the war if “the second stage negotiations are ineffectual,” adding that President-elect Donald J. Trump would support Israel’s decision.

“We retain the right to return to the war, if necessary, with the backing of the United States,” Mr. Netanyahu said in a televised address.

The truce’s fragility was underscored on Sunday morning when Hamas did not immediately hand over a list of hostages to be released to Israel, prompting a nearly three-hour delay in the cease-fire. Analysts say the deal will probably see numerous similar tests over the next few weeks as both sides flex their muscles.

The families of Israeli hostages still held in Gaza have called on the Israeli government to bring home the remaining captives by fulfilling all the phases of the deal. Noa Argamani, a freed hostage whose boyfriend, Avinatan Or, remains in captivity, said that it broke her heart that he was not going to be freed in this round.

“The progress in the past few days is a very important step, but the deal must go through in full, completely, in all of its stages,” Ms. Argamani said in a speech in Miami on Thursday.

About 100 hostages, living and dead, are thought still to be held in Gaza, most of them taken in the deadly Hamas-led attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Thirty-three of them will be released during an initial six-week phase of the cease-fire, including female soldiers and civilians, children, men over 50 and sick and wounded people, according to the agreement.

“The vast majority” of the 33 hostages to be released in the six-week first phase of the cease-fire are alive, an Israeli military spokesman, Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, said Sunday in a discussion on social media.

Video released by the Israeli military showed the three hostages being reunited with their families at Sheba Hospital in Israel.

In one clip, one of the returned hostages, Romi Gonen, is surrounded in an embrace by members of her family as they tearfully comfort one another. Yarden Gonen, her sister, who had traveled around the world in the past year to lobby for Romi’s release, jumps up and down in the video as the family hugs. In another clip, another released hostage, Doron Steinbrecher, tearfully embraces loved ones.

Romi Gonen

Ms. Gonen was 23 when she was captured as she was trying to leave the Nova music festival in southern Israel when Hamas attacked. She was speaking at the time to her mother, Meirav Gonen, who said she had been shot and was bleeding.

Last February, Meirav Gonen released a recording of her last phone call with her daughter. She told the Israeli news media that Romi was a strong and happy person who often went to raves.

In the early weeks of the war, her mother expressed concern that Israeli military operations in Gaza could endanger the hostages.

Romi Gonen’s older sister, Yarden, told The New York Times in February that she regularly went to a plaza in Tel Aviv where families of hostages have held vigils.

“None of us is doing anything remotely related to our previous lives,” she said.

Emily Damari

Ms. Damari, 27 at the time she was captured, is the only hostage with British citizenship who was still being held this month. She was taken from her home in Kibbutz Kfar Azza in southern Israel and was seen by a neighbor in her own car, driven by a militant, heading toward Gaza.

Ms. Damari was raised in Israel but traveled to Britain often, according to her mother, British-born Mandy Damari, who was in Israel last month to speak with officials and the news media and to plead for a hostage and cease-fire deal. She said that her daughter had been shot and that she feared for her life, telling the BBC that she had welcomed the threats from President-elect Donald J. Trump that there would be “all hell to pay” if no deal was reached by his inauguration.

Last January, a hostage who had been released from Gaza, Dafna Elyakim, told the Israeli news media that she and her younger sister had been taken into Hamas’s underground tunnels, where they met other female hostages, including Ms. Damari.

On the eve of the first anniversary of the Oct. 7 attacks, Mandy Damari spoke at an event in Hyde Park in London, where she described her daughter as a soccer fan who enjoyed a drink and had “the classic British sense of humor, with a dash of Israeli chutzpah thrown in for good measure.”

On Sunday, Mandy Damari thanked “everyone who never stopped fighting for Emily throughout this horrendous ordeal.” But, she said in a statement, “for too many other families the impossible wait continues.”

The Israeli military also released a picture of Emily Damari and her mother that showed her missing two fingers on her left hand. Ms. Damari was shot in the hand on Oct. 7, 2023.

Doron Steinbrecher

Ms. Steinbrecher, who was 30 when she was captured from her home in Kibbutz Kfar Azza, is a veterinary nurse with Romanian and Israeli citizenship. According to Israeli news media, she was in touch with her family on the kibbutz when the militants attacked, telling her parents that they had smashed her windows and shot into her room.

“They’ve arrived, they have me,” she said in a subsequent voice message sent to friends.

Last January, Hamas released a video clip of Ms. Steinbrecher and two other captives, Daniella Gilboa and Karina Ariev, in which they pleaded for their release.

Last March, on her 31st birthday, the Jewish News Syndicate published an interview with her mother, Simona Steinbrecher, who said that she had looked pale and thin in the video. She said she was concerned that Ms. Steinbrecher was not getting the daily medication she needed, though she did not specify what that was.

“She’s a strong woman, but it’s terrible being there,” Simona Steinbrecher said.

On Sunday, the family of Doron Steinbrecher issued a statement celebrating her release that thanked the Israeli people and expressed gratitude to Mr. Trump “for his significant involvement and support, which meant so much to us.” The statement did not mention President Biden or any Israeli leaders.