Closing summary
Here’s a look at where things currently stand:
Egypt’s president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi held a meeting on Monday with the presidents of France and Turkey, and Qatar’s emir and others to help coordinate the implementation of the Gaza ceasefire and reconstruction efforts for the territory, according to a statement by the Egyptian president’s office. The meeting was held on the sidelines of an international summit in Egypt’s Sharm el-Sheikh to finalise an agreement aimed at ending the war in Gaza.
Hamas has started deploying armed fighters and police across parts of Gaza in an apparent attempt to reassert authority in the devastated Palestinian territory after the ceasefire deal agreed with Israel last week. Images showed dozens of Hamas fighters at a hospital in southern Gaza during the release of Israeli hostages on Monday morning and there were reports of shootings and executions elsewhere in the territory.
A last-minute plan by Donald Trump to invite Benjamin Netanyahu to a multinational Gaza summit in Egypt had to be aborted after the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, said he would not land his plane in Sharm el-Sheikh if the invitation stood. The mid-air power power struggle started after it was announced that the Israeli prime minister had accepted a late invitation from Trump to the conference being jointly chaired by the US president and his Egyptian counterpart, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, in Egypt.
Two busloads of Palestinian detainees were transferred from Israeli prisons to Ramallah, in the occupied West Bank, on Monday, where jubilant crowds awaited them. In total, 88 of the nearly 2,000 prisoners were sent to the West Bank, with the rest deported to Gaza, according to the Palestinian Prisoners’ Commission.
Trump declared that the ceasefire agreement marks the end of Israel’s war on Gaza, as well as the end of the “age of terror and death”. Speaking to the Knesset, the US president said: ‘This is not only the end of a war. This is the end of the age of terror and death and the beginning of the age of faith and hope and of God.”
Netanyahu said Trump is the greatest friend Israel has ever had. “Donald Trump is the greatest friend that the State of Israel has ever had in the White House,” he told the Knesset. “No American president has ever done more for the state of Israel, and as I said in Washington, it ain’t even close,” the Israeli prime minister said.
At least 67,869 Palestinian people have been killed and 170,105 others injured in Israeli attacks on Gaza since 7 October 2023, the Gaza health ministry said in a statement on Monday. In a statement, the health ministry said the bodies of 63 people, including 60 recovered from rubble, arrived in hospitals across the Gaza Strip over the latest 24-hour reporting period.
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The “Summit for Peace” was a virtual who’s who of Middle Eastern and European politics, while attracting other unlikely power brokers in the Trump era of international diplomacy such as FIFA president, Gianni Infantino.
Leaders from at least 27 countries, many in Europe and the Middle East, joined the Summit in Sharm el-Sheikh on Monday.
Conspicuously absent among them was Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, whose presence other regional leaders would likely have protested. But there were the leaders of the major Arab and regional states, including Egypt’s Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi, Turkey’s Recep Erdoğan, as well as the leaders of the Gulf states Qatar and United Arab Emirates.
Keir Starmer and European leaders from France, Germany, Italy, Hungary and others also attended.
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