GAZA STRIP/JERUSALEM  -  Thirteen Israeli hostages captured during Palestinian fighters’ cross-border raids were back in Israeli territory where they would undergo medical checks before being reunited with their families, the army said on Friday. They included four children and six elderly women, an official Israeli list showed.

All 13 Israeli hostages have been released, the Israel Prime Minister’s office said. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to bring all the hostages home. 

“This is one of the goals of the war, and we are committed to achieving all the goals of the war,” he said.

A convoy of Red Cross vehicles was earlier seen crossing the border between Gaza and Egypt, with some of the passengers waving, after Hamas handed over the hostages to the humanitarian organisation.

Israel is set to free three times as many Palestinian prisoners -- women and teenage boys

-- under a deal that followed weeks of talks involving Israel, Palestinian militant groups, Qatar, Egypt and the United States. Key mediator Qatar confirmed Hamas had on Friday released a total of 24 hostages and that Israel had freed 39 women and children from its prisons.

The Red Cross also confirmed 24 hostages have been released. After 48 days of gunfire and bombardment that claimed thousands of lives, a four-day truce in the Israel-Hamas war began on Friday with hostages set to be released in exchange for Palestinian prisoners.

The pause triggered a mass movement of thousands of Gazans who had sought refuge in schools and hospitals from relentless Israeli bombardment begun after unprecedented attacks on October 7 by Hamas.

“I’m going home,” Omar Jibrin, 16, told AFP after he emerged from a hospital in the south of the Gaza Strip where he and eight family members had sought refuge.

In Khan Yunis, in southern Gaza where many Palestinians fled, a cacophony of car horns and ambulance sirens has replaced the sound of war. 

For Khaled al-Halabi, the truce is “a chance to breathe” after nearly seven weeks of war that began when Hamas broke through Gaza’s militarised border to kill, according to Israeli officials, about 1,200 people. 

Halabi had taken refuge in Rafah but is from Gaza City in the north, much of which has been reduced to rubble. 

Israel’s retaliatory air, artillery and naval strikes alongside a ground offensive have killed about 15,000 people, the Hamas government in Gaza said.

Mediator Qatar said the first group of 13 hostages released would be women and children. 

They would be freed “by 4:00 pm (1400 GMT) at the latest”, according to a Hamas official speaking to AFP on condition of anonymity. 

The lives of Gazans have been turned upside down since Hamas, which rules the Palestinian territory, launched attack on Israel on October 7. Israeli authorities say around 1,200 people were killed. 

Weeks of sustained Israeli bombardment in response has killed nearly 15,000 people, around two thirds of them women and children, Gaza’s Hamas government says.

Some 1.7 million of the territory’s 2.4 million people are estimated to have been displaced, the United Nations says.

With more than half of homes damaged or destroyed according to the UN, Gazans were unsure if would still have a roof over their heads when they return.