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After weeks of negotiations, Hamas on Friday released the first batch of captives it had agreed to set free under a truce deal with Israel that came into effect in the morning.

Fighters took 237 people into captivity from Israel after Hamas’s October 7 attack. Under the deal for a four-day truce, Hamas is to release 50 captives in exchange for the release of 150 Palestinians imprisoned in Israel and a pause in fighting. However, more than those numbers might be released, officials indicated.

The deal was reached, and announced by Qatar, on Wednesday, while the truce officially started at 7:00am local time (5:00 GMT) on Friday.

Here is what we know about the captives released by Hamas and those who are still in Gaza.

How many captives were released on Friday?

In all, 25 captives were freed by Hamas on Friday. While initially, the plan was for Hamas to release 13 captives — women and children — it eventually also released 12 Thai captives in addition.

The Prime Minister of Thailand announced the release of the Thai nationals on X.

ได้รับการยืนยันจากฝ่ายความมั่นคงและกระทรวงต่างประเทศว่า มีตัวประกันชาวไทย 12 คนได้ถูกปล่อยตัวออกมาแล้วขณะนี้เจ้าหน้าที่สถานทูตกำลังไปรับตัวอีก 1 ชั่วโมงน่าจะทราบชื่อและรายละเอียดต่างๆครับกรุณาคอยติดตาม

— Srettha Thavisin (@Thavisin) November 24, 2023

All 25 captives were transferred by Hamas to representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross, who crossed them over from Gaza into Egypt through the Rafah crossing.

The captives were handed over to Egyptian authorities.

At what time were they released?

The 12 Thai captives were released just before 4:00pm local time (14:00 GMT).

About half an hour later, the 13 other captives were released, Hamas officials told AFP.

On the Egyptian side of the border, the freed Israeli captives met representatives of the Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, according to the Israel Broadcasting Authority.

Medical staff, soldiers and helicopters are also waiting for them. The released captives will be taken in helicopters to hospitals in Tel Aviv for medical and psychological assessments.

At the hospitals, captives will also reunite with their families, the Israeli army said earlier on Friday.

Which captives will be released?

The 12 Thai captives who were freed on Friday are among 23 who were captured by Palestinian fighters during their attack on southern Israel on October 7.

On Thursday, the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office confirmed that it received an initial list of the 13 others to be freed and was in contact with their families.

 

However, relatives of the first group have not commented on the release. The Israeli government has reportedly warned them to not speak with the media and asked news outlets to not publish names accessed through any leaks.

Who might be released next?

The 13 captives who were originally to be released today are among the 50 that Hamas has committed to freeing over four days under the truce agreement.

But with the 12 Thai captives also being released, the total number of those whom Hamas frees during the truce is expected to exceed 50.

Three US citizens and eight French citizens are among those who could be freed in the later batches of released captives during the truce, according to officials from the two countries. The three American captives include two women and a three-year-old girl whose parents were killed in the initial Hamas attack.

Ghazi Hamad, member of Hamas’s political bureau, told Al Jazeera that they are focused on releasing civilians for now. Hamad added that a comprehensive release of captives, including Israeli soldiers, would require an exchange with all 7,200 Palestinians who are imprisoned.

How many captives does Hamas have and who are they?

Palestinian fighters took 237 people into captivity during its Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, according to Israel, although not all of them are currently with Hamas.

Other resistance groups in the Gaza Strip, such as the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, are also holding some captives. The finalisation of the truce deal involved the agreement of all resistance brigades via phone call, said Hamas prior to the deal’s announcement.

Hamas fighters abducted the captives during raids on an outdoor music festival, collective farms called kibbutzim, and military bases in Israel on October 7.

Not all captives are Israeli. At least half are foreign and dual nationals hailing from approximately 40 countries including the US, Thailand, United Kingdom, France, Argentina, Germany, Chile, Spain and Portugal, according to the Israeli government.

At least 33 captives are children, including preschoolers and a 10-month-old baby, according to Israel. They have also reported that others in the group include soldiers, the elderly, and people with disabilities.

Hamas has said that the captives are housed in “safe places and tunnels”. Freed captives have reported sleeping on mattresses on floors of tunnels and being provided medical care.

Have any captives been released from Gaza?

Hamas has previously released four captives that were being held in Gaza.

The first pair of captives freed was an American mother-daughter duo on October 20, following Qatari meditation.

Three days later, two elderly women were returned to Israel on “humanitarian reasons and poor health grounds”, following mediation led by Egypt and Qatar.

Israel’s military has said that it rescued one abducted soldier, Ori Megidish, and found the body of another near al-Shifa Hospital. Hamas has said that Israeli air attacks have killed 50 captives in Gaza, including their army conscript, Noa Marciano, near the hospital.

On November 16, Israel’s military also said it recovered the body of a civilian captive, Yehudit Weiss, near al-Shifa.

On Tuesday, the PIJ said one elderly woman, Hanna Katzir, died in captivity owing to Israel “stalling” her release after the group offered to return her for humanitarian reasons. Israel has not responded to these claims.

Nairobi, Kenya – For years, the Kenyan government has sought to protect the Mau Forest, spanning around 4,000 hectares across several counties, from encroachment and destruction by people who fell trees to sell for charcoal and firewood. But human rights groups have said these efforts have been marred by human rights violations that are yet to stop.

From 2004 to 2006, 100,000 people were evicted from the forest, according to separate reports by rights groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, as well as the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights. These bodies also allege that serious abuses have been committed by successive governments to date.

The latest wave of evictions, which began on November 2, affected more than 1,000 of the Ogiek, a community that has been predominantly hunter-gatherers for centuries in the area in and around the forest.

“As I know it myself, we have lived here for 174 years,” Wilson Ngusilo, a chairperson of the Ogiek council in Narok County in southwest Kenya, told Al Jazeera. “I buried my father on this land at the age of 105 years, and I am personally 69 years old myself. I have known this as my home and don’t know where I am supposed to go.”

The displaced Ogiek said most of their homes were torched by Kenya Forest Service officers.

“Whenever the [officers] meet someone on the way carrying their belongings towards their home, they snatch the belongings and throw them into a river,” Ngusilo said. “On day one, 250 officers came and another 60 joined them the next day. They even brought down my permanent house after destroying it for two days straight.”

Members of the community have been scattered across the area and now live in makeshift structures made of donated nylon bags. They said they are waiting for the government to show them an alternative place to call home.

“Those whose houses have been burned and have not been lucky to get the structures have gone into the forest to take shelter under trees against the heavy rainfall that’s ongoing,” said Daniel Kobei, executive director of the Ogiek People’s Development Program (OPDP). “They use tree bark to cover themselves and especially their children.”

A history of evictions and litigation

The Ogiek were first evicted by the British colonial government after it occupied Kenya in 1920. They moved to other parts of the forest and set up their lives again.

“In fact, most of them were even turned into forest guards by the colonial government when it failed to evict them,” Kobei told Al Jazeera. “They used to put up beehives and protect the forest.”

Initially, the Ogiek only hunted and gathered food inside the forest, mainly depending on bees for honey. But they began intermarrying with nomadic communities like the Maasai and Kipsigis, and they lived in the forest together, which led to increased farming and burning of charcoal for sale as a source of income.

When the forest was declared a national reserve in 1954, the Ogiek claimed exclusive ownership of the place and thus began a long battle with successive governments. By 1996, the Ogiek petitioned the Kenyan Parliament over the issue, but having failed to extract a favourable commitment, they turned to the courts.

President Daniel arap Moi’s government tried – in 1992 and 2001 –  to settle the Ogiek within the forest after a tea-planting project barred communities from nearby areas from crossing into what was designated as forest land, but it became hard to resolve because some of those communities moved in, claiming to be part of the Ogiek community.

The Ogiek decided to go to court, even as the authorities began evictions in the mid-2000s.

The case dragged on for almost 12 years in the Kenyan judicial system, so the Ogiek resolved to approach regional justice mechanisms for a permanent solution. They filed a case with the Arusha, Tanzania-based African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR), and after six more years, it delivered a landmark ruling on May 26, 2017, in their favour.

The Kenyan government appealed the decision, but the ACHPR ruled against it again in 2022.

“The reparation [judgement by the ACHPR] was done again on June 23, 2022, in the same court in Arusha, underscoring what is to be done, which included restitution to be given their land,” Kobei told Al Jazeera. “And there was some compensation [157,000 shillings ($1,026) per person] to be given. The government was to publish the ruling, both the merit and the reparation, the judgment, which they have not done.”

International pressure

The evictions began again in November just as Britain’s King Charles III was visiting Kenya, his first state visit since succeeding his mother, Queen Elizabeth II, to the throne.

The environment ministry said it was reclaiming parts of the Mau Forest from “encroachment and illegal logging activities”. It also urged the police and KFS to carry out the exercise in a humane manner. But the Ogiek said this has not been the case.

Kobei said a local court order obtained on November 15 halted the evictions but there are still police officers manning the roads in the Sasimwani area of Narok County. The security agents have reportedly been threatening people from going back to their destroyed homes and promising to continue with the evictions.

On November 6, the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights through its Kenya representative, Solomon Ayele Dersso, sent a letter to the Kenyan government, saying it was gravely concerned about the ongoing evictions.

It called for “the cessation of the evictions to limit the irreparable damage that may be caused to the lives, bodily integrity, sources of livelihoods, family life, safety and security” of the Ogiek.

Three days later, Minority Rights Group Africa, a nonprofit working for the protection of the rights of ethnic minorities and Indigenous peoples, described the exercise as “an illegal, violent eviction campaign”.

According to the group, the Kenyan government’s actions are in direct violation of the two landmark judgements issued by the ACHPR.

“[The] judgments … made it clear, inter alia [among other things] that the Ogiek are an indigenous people and are owners of their ancestral lands in the Mau Forest; that the government of Kenya should restitute Ogiek ancestral land through the process of demarcating, delimiting and granting collective title to the Ogiek in the Mau Forest; that the Kenyan government is required to consult Ogiek on any matter regarding their ancestral land, and that the government could not use conservation as a justification to evict the community,” it said in a statement on November 9.

The Kenyan government said at the time of the ruling that it accepted the judgment but has yet to comment on the current evictions.

Meanwhile, the Ogiek said they hope to see more international pressure on the authorities to let them be.

“We call upon the international community to pressure or talk to the government of Kenya to respect such a small, Indigenous minority community not to be in this quagmire of always crying for their land rights and evictions,” Kobei said. “That’s our wish and desire that we can develop like other Kenyans and pursue other important issues in the country.”

With children and pets in their arms and their belongings loaded onto donkey carts or car roofs, thousands of displaced Gaza Palestinians have set off for home as a four-day Israel-Hamas truce began.

The din of war was replaced on Friday by the horns of traffic jams and sirens of ambulances making their way through crowds emerging from hospitals and schools where they had taken refuge.

For nearly seven weeks, Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip had been relentless.

Some 1.7 million of the territory’s 2.4 million people are estimated to have been displaced, and more than half of homes damaged or destroyed, the United Nations says.

But on Friday morning, no shots were heard in Khan Younis, in the south of the Palestinian territory.

Crowds of men, women and children travelled on foot, carts or tuk-tuks with the few belongings they had taken with them when the war started.

Large parts of Gaza have been flattened by thousands of air raids, and the territory faces shortages of food, water and fuel.

Israeli warplanes dropped leaflets warning people in the south not to head back to the north, where it had previously told Palestinians to leave for their safety.

“The war is not over yet,” they read. “Returning to the north is forbidden and very dangerous!!!”

Venice will now charge visitors for a day trip next year, in a bid to manage overcrowding.

From next spring, the Italian canal city will charge those visiting for one day €5 (£4.34) each on 29 days between April and July.

The capital of Veneto, built on 120 small islands, welcomes around 25 million people a year, but scientists from the European Geosciences Union warned that the city could be underwater by 2100 as sea levels rise.

Those taking a day trip between 25 April and 5 May, and every Saturday and Sunday from May to 14 July will be charged. However, the first weekend of June is excluded.

The fee generally applies to all tourists aged 14 and over who are not staying in Venice overnight in that period.

Those staying overnight will have to register for an exemption at www.cda.ve.it from 16 January.

The fee will be in effect during peak hours from 8.30am until 4pm, which means visitors who come into Venice for dinner or a concert won’t have to pay.

Anyone exempt during peak hours will have to carry a QR code proving so, other than residents of the city and people who were born in Venice.

Property owners, students and commuters will have to register for a code valid for a year.

Anyone visiting the city for short-term business or study will also have to register for daily codes.

Mayor Luigi Brugnaro said in a council meeting about the new fee: “This isn’t a revolution, but the first step on the path to regulate day tripper access – an experiment whose aim is to better the livability of the city, of who lives here and works here.

“Venice is the first city in the world to start out on this journey which could become an example for other fragile cities that must be preserved.”

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In August, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) recommended Venice be added to its list of World Heritage in Danger over growing concerns of overcrowding and unsustainability.

The agency said steps proposed by the Italian state to tackle the issues are “currently insufficient and not detailed enough”.

Venice avoided being blacklisted in 2021 as Italy banned cruise ships from entering its lagoon to defend its ecosystem. UNESCO members cited the day-tripper fee as a reason to keep it off the endangered list.

Twelve Thai nationals have been released by Hamas, its Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin has said, as Israel awaits the release of 13 hostages as part of a truce deal.

The temporary truce period agreed by Israel and Hamas will see Palestinian prisoners freed from Israeli jails and fighting paused for four days in Gaza.

Some 50 women and children being held by Hamas are set to be freed over four days – during which there will be a pause in Israeli strikes in Gaza.

Israel said it would stop its offensive on the Gaza Strip for an extra day for every 10 additional hostages released.

Follow live: Israel-Gaza latest

It is expected to free a total of 150 Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails during the truce period in exchange for the hostages, though officials have published a list of 300 in case the deal is extended.

As part of the temporary truce, humanitarian relief, medical and fuel aid are to be allowed into the entirety of the Gaza Strip.

Israel will also halt surveillance in southern Gaza for four days and curtail it to six hours a day in the north.

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