Updates: Hamas, PIJ name three Israeli captives to be freed in Gaza

The live page is now closed.

To learn more about the tenuous ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas, check out our coverage of tomorrow’s exchange here.

You can also view photos showing the obstacles that Palestinians in Gaza continue to face as they try to rebuild amid the rubble and destruction caused by Israel’s devastating war on the Strip.

We will be closing the live blog soon. Here’s a brief recap of the day’s main events:

• Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) named Alexander Trufanov, Sagui Dekel-Chen and Yair Horn as three male Israeli captives to be released in Gaza tomorrow as part of a ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas, with 369 Palestinians to be released in exchange.
• A Palestinian NGO says that Dr Hussam Abu Safia, a medical worker and director of Gaza’s Kamal Adwan Hospital, is being held by Israel under a law that allows for prolonged detention without charge. The announcement comes days after Abu Safia’s lawyers said that he had been tortured in an Israeli military prison.
• A deputy force commander with UNIFIL was injured when a crowd of Hezbollah supporters lit a UN vehicle on fire in Beirut. UNIFIL denounced the incident as an “outrageous attack on peacekeepers”.
• At least 16 Palestinians were injured after dozens of Israeli settlers wielding clubs and rifle butts attacked the village of al-Maniya in the occupied West Bank, the latest incident to underscore an alarming trend of rising settler attacks on Palestinians.

Tehran has barred Lebanese planes from repatriating dozens of Lebanese nationals stranded in Iran in a standoff after Lebanon blocked a civilian flight following what the Iranian government described as an Israeli threat to attack it.

Lebanon halted an Iranian flight to Beirut this week after the Israeli military accused Tehran of using civilian aircraft to smuggle cash to Beirut to arm Hezbollah.

Iran said it would not allow Lebanese flights to land until its own flights were cleared to land in Beirut.

The standoff has left dozens of Lebanese citizens stranded in Iran for three days after attending a religious pilgrimage. They had been due to return to Beirut on Iran’s Mahan Air before Lebanon barred the plane from landing.

Dozens of Hezbollah supporters cut off roads around Beirut’s airport late on Thursday and Friday in protest.

A spokesperson for the UN children’s agency UNICEF says that the ceasefire has allowed more aid to reach children in Gaza, but that humanitarian conditions remain dire.

“The situation in Gaza remains catastrophic for children. It’s a good situation in that the bombs and the bullets have stopped falling, killing children, injuring children, but the humanitarian crisis continues,” Tess Ingram, a spokesperson for UNICEF, said in an interview shared by the UN.

“For the children in Gaza, they urgently need humanitarian assistance. They need both supplies and services to scale up quickly, and the ceasefire is a really good opportunity for us to do that,” she added.

The United Nations Human Rights Office has condemned Israel’s intensifying operation in the northern occupied West Bank and called for an immediate halt to the “alarming wave of violence and mass displacement”.

“[Israeli forces] have so far killed 44 Palestinians, many of them unarmed and not posing an imminent threat to life or of serious injury, since the start of the operation on 21 January which has affected Jenin, Tulkarem, and Tubas governorates, and four refugee camps in these areas,” the UNHRC said in a statement.

The UN said that five children were among the death toll, including a 10-year-old boy, Saddam Hussein Rajab, who was shot in the chest by Israeli forces in Tulkarem while just standing in front of a building.

“This is part of an expanding pattern of Israel’s unlawful use of force in the West Bank where there are no active hostilities, and a continuously increasing number of apparently unlawful killings documented by the UN Human Rights Office,” it said.

The UN also said Palestinians in the occupied West Bank were being displaced in numbers not seen in decades – nearly 40,000 so far in this operation.

The UNHRC said it had “received daily reports from displaced residents describing a pattern where they are led out of their homes by [Israeli forces] and drones under the threat of violence.

“They are then forced out of their towns with snipers positioned on rooftops around them and houses in their neighbourhoods used as posts by [Israeli forces].”

The Palestinian Authority’s commission of prisoners’ affairs has published the names of 369 Palestinian prisoners slated to be released on Saturday in exchange for three Israeli captives in the latest swap of the Israel-Hamas ceasefire deal.

Just eight Palestinians will be received by crowds of family, friends and supporters in the occupied West Bank. Four prisoners will be released back to their homes in occupied East Jerusalem.

Twenty-four prisoners serving life sentences for deadly attacks against Israelis will be sent into exile in Egypt.

The remaining 333 Palestinians who will be released were detained from the Gaza Strip after Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack.

US President Donald Trump has said he would take a hard stance on Gaza this Saturday, echoing comments he made earlier this week in which he urged Hamas to release all the remaining Israeli captives – roughly 70 people – before Sunday, or failing that ends the ceasefire deal.

“If it was up to me, I’d take a very hard stance. I can’t tell you what Israel is going to do,” Trump told reporters.

The Patriarchs and Heads of the Churches in Jerusalem say they are “compelled to speak against the grave threat of mass displacement” as Trump and Israeli leaders call for the forced expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza.

“The people of Gaza, families who have lived for generations in the land of their ancestors, must not be forced into exile, stripped of whatever is left of their homes, their heritage, and their right to remain in the land that forms the essence of their identity,” they said in a statement.

“As Christians, we cannot be indifferent to such suffering, for the Gospel commands us to uphold the dignity of every human being.”

The Heads of Churches in Jerusalem speak firmly against the uprooting of the people of Gaza from their land. Will American Christians, who claim to care for Middle Eastern Christians, for once listen to the Heads of Churches and speak against this evil plan? pic.twitter.com/j2QFgiQcNR

— Munther Isaac منذر اسحق (@MuntherIsaac) February 14, 2025

The Palestinian NGO Al Mezan says that Dr Hussam Abu Safia, a medical worker and director of the Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, is being held under Israel’s Unlawful Combatants Law, which allows prolonged detention without charge and strips those held of due process.

“Our lawyer has been informed that the Commander of the Southern Command of the Israeli army has issued an order to detain Dr Abu Safia under the Unlawful Combatants Law,” Al Mezan said in a social media post.

“This law enables prolonged detention without charges, stripping detainees of any meaningful judicial review or due process rights. Since October 2023, Israeli authorities have extensively used this legal framework to arbitrarily detain thousands of Palestinian residents of Gaza.”

Abu Safia was an outspoken voice who brought attention to Israeli attacks on medical facilities such as Kamal Adwan in Gaza. He was detained by Israeli forces in December but was only allowed to speak to his lawyer this week.

His lawyer said on Wednesday that Abu Safia had been tortured in an Israeli military prison, where such abuses are common.

There’s been another update on the violent protests we covered earlier near Beirut international airport.

The United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) says its outgoing deputy force commander was injured after a convoy taking peacekeepers to Beirut airport was “violently attacked”.

“We are shocked by this outrageous attack on peacekeepers who have been serving to restore security and stability to south Lebanon during a difficult time,” UNIFIL said in a statement.

“Attacks on peacekeepers are flagrant violations of international law and may amount to war crimes. We demand a full and immediate investigation by Lebanese authorities and for all perpetrators to be brought to justice.”

The army said in a statement that acting commander Major General Hassan Odeh had contacted UNIFIL and promised to “work to arrest the citizens who attacked its members and bring them to justice”.

Demonstrators have been blocking the road to the airport and other roads in the capital to protest a decision by Lebanese authorities to revoke permission for a passenger plane from Iran to fly to Beirut on Thursday, leaving dozens of Lebanese passengers stranded.

Al Jazeera is reporting from Amman because it is banned from Israel and the occupied West Bank by the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority.

We’re hearing reports that US Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff is trying to talk to mediators Qatar and Egypt to try to expedite the release of the remaining captives in Gaza who are alive and are set to be released as part of phase one of the ceasefire deal.

After the three men will be released tomorrow, Israeli intelligence says that there will be six remaining captives who are alive.

And what the Americans are hoping to do, according to these reports, is to have them released earlier than on next Saturday, February 22, and the final Saturday of phase one, March 1.

But it’s still unclear if that’s going to succeed and if Hamas is going to accept that, given that they’ve been accusing Israel of violating the ceasefire for more than a week now.

Hamas are saying that Israel is preventing critical humanitarian aid from entering the Gaza Strip in the form of mobile homes, caravans and tents and also large machinery that would help Palestinians find the bodies of those who have been killed and are still under the rubble.

The Gaza authorities say there are more than 10,000 bodies under the rubble that need to be retrieved, however, they cannot do that without this equipment and machinery.

It’s unclear why it hasn’t been allowed in, but several Israeli officials who have spoken anonymously said Israel has not allowed that equipment in.

The Arab Group at the UN along with a group of UN ambassadors has rejected any plans to displace Palestinians in Gaza, deeming it a violation of international law.

“The displacement of Palestinians in Gaza must be unequivocally rejected. The Arab Group categorically rejects such displacement, which constitutes a clear violation of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949,” Kuwait’s UN envoy, Tareq Al Banai, said as the chairperson of the Arab Group at a news conference at UN headquarters in New York.

The statement was also backed by ambassadors from the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation and the Non-Aligned Movement.

The Kuwaiti envoy hailed the international community’s stance against forced displacement and urged a “united and unequivocal rejection by member states”.

Al Banai outlined a vision for Gaza’s future, saying: “We, the Arab countries, want to see a Riviera, a Palestinian Gazan Riviera in the independent and internationally recognised state of Palestine.”

Margaret Satterthwaite, the UN special rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers, has strongly criticised Trump’s sanctions against the International Criminal Court (ICC), calling them a “direct assault on the international justice system”.

In an interview with the Anadolu news agency, Satterthwaite discussed Trump’s decision to impose sanctions on ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan, the impact of these measures on the court’s operations and what court member states should do in response.

“[It’s a] direct attack on the international justice system. This is a court that was set up in order to once again try to found the primacy of law over conflict, over violence, and it’s a court that is set up to look at the very most grave crimes under international law,” she said.

“So sanctioning this entity and its principal officers is a direct attack on that rule of law institution and on the effort to end impunity for these very grave crimes.”

Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan has met with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio to discuss the situation in Gaza, among other issues, diplomatic sources say.

During their first face-to-face meeting, which came on the margins of the Munich Security Conference, Fidan emphasised the importance of a permanent ceasefire in Gaza and said the Israeli-Palestinian conflict must be resolved to establish regional peace.

Fidan also held separate meetings with his British counterpart, David Lammy, and German counterpart, Annalena Baerbock, on the sidelines of the conference.