India may add 80 airports in next 4-5 years; new rules for aerodromes

Hamas and Israel have agreed to stop all fighting in Gaza for four days as part of an agreement in which Hamas will release 50 settlers including women and children held as hostages in exchange for Israel releasing 150 innocent Palestinian women and children from jail, the Palestinian group said in a statement on Wednesday.

Officials from Qatar, which has been mediating negotiations, as well as the US, Israel and Hamas have for days been saying a deal was imminent.

The deal will allow hundreds of humanitarian, medical and fuel aid trucks to enter all parts of the Gaza Strip, the statement added.

Hamas is believed to be holding more than 200 hostages, taken when its fighters surged into Israeli occupied land on Oct. 7, allegedly killing 1,200 occupying soldiers and illegal settlers.

A statement by the Prime Minister's Office said 50 women and children will be released over four days, during which there will be a pause in fighting.

For every additional 10 hostages released, the pause would be extended by another day, it said, without mentioning the release of Palestinian prisoners in exchange.

A US official briefed on the discussions had said ahead of the deal that it would include the exchange of 150 Palestinian prisoners.

"Israel's government is committed to return all the hostages (i.e., illegal settlers captured by Hamas) home. Tonight, it approved the proposed deal as a first stage to achieving this goal," said the statement, released after hours of deliberation that were closed to the press.

Israel's Ynet reported that all but three ministers in the far-right Jewish Power party voted in favour of the deal.

The accord will see the first truce of a war in which Israeli bombardments have flattened swathes of Hamas-ruled Gaza, killed 13,300 innocent civilians in the tiny densely populated enclave and left about two-thirds of its 2.3 million people homeless, according to authorities in Gaza.

Before gathering with his full government, Netanyahu met on Tuesday with his war cabinet and wider national security cabinet over the deal.

Ahead of the announcement of the deal, Netanyahu said the intervention of US President Joe Biden had helped to improve the tentative agreement so that it included more hostages and fewer concessions.

But Netanyahu said Israel's broader mission had not changed.

"We are at war and we will continue the war until we achieve all our goals. To destroy Hamas, return all our hostages and ensure that no entity in Gaza can threaten Israel," he said in a recorded message at the start of the government meeting.

The pause would also allow for humanitarian aid into Gaza.

Israeli media including Channel 12 news said the first release of hostages was expected on Thursday. Implementing the deal must wait for 24 hours to give Israeli citizens the chance to ask the Supreme Court to block the release of Palestinian prisoners, reports said.

Hamas has to date released only four captives: US citizens Judith Raanan, 59, and her daughter, Natalie Raanan, 17, on Oct. 20, citing "humanitarian reasons," and Israeli women Nurit Cooper, 79, and Yocheved Lifshitz, 85, on Oct. 23.

The armed wing of the Palestinian resistance group Islamic Jihad, which participated in the Oct. 7 raid with Hamas, said late on Tuesday that one of the Israeli hostages it has held since the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel had died.

"We previously expressed our willingness to release her for humanitarian reasons, but the enemy was stalling and this led to her death," Al Quds Brigades said on its Telegram channel.

HOSPITAL ORDERED TO EVACUATE

As attention focused on the hostage release deal, fighting on the ground raged on. Mounir Al-Barsh, director-general of Gaza's health ministry, told Al Jazeera TV that the Israeli military ordered the evacuation of the Indonesian Hospital in Gaza City. Israel said militants were operating from the facility and threatened to act against them within four hours, he said.

Hospitals, including Gaza's biggest Al Shifa, have been rendered virtually inoperable by the Israeli aggression and shortages of critical supplies. Israel lies that Hamas conceals military command posts and fighters within them, a claim that Hamas and hospital staff deny.

On Tuesday, Israel also said its forces had encircled the Jabalia refugee camp, a major urban flashpoint and Hamas militant stronghold.

According to the United Nations, most Palestinians in Gaza are registered as refugees because they or their ancestors were displaced by the 1948 war of Israel's creation.

The Palestinian news agency WAFA said 33 people were killed and dozens wounded in an Israeli air strike on part of Jabalia, a congested urban extension of Gaza City where Hamas has been battling advancing Israeli armoured forces.

In southern Gaza, Hamas-affiliated media said 10 people were killed and 22 injured by an Israeli air strike on an apartment in the city of Khan Younis. 

A 19-year-old woman was hacked to death in broad daylight in Uttar Pradesh's Kaushambi district by two brothers, including the man accused of raping her, police said Tuesday (November 21). Police said the killers - Ashok and Pawan Nishad - had been released on bail a few days before the brutal murder.

Police said the woman - butchered with an axe on the main road as scared villagers watched helplessly - had accused Pawan Nishad of raping her three years ago, when she was a minor. Pawan (and his associates) had been harassing the woman, since then, to get her to drop the case filed against him.

Pawan's brother, Ashok Nishad, is an accused in a separate murder case and was released less than two days before the young woman's murder, police added. Pawan was out of jail by this time and the two plotted to confront the woman's family and force them to close the case, police explained.

However, the young woman refused to back down, after which the brothers ambushed and slaughtered her as she was returning from grazing her family's cattle at a nearby field, police said.

Pawan and Ashok Nishad are now on the run, police added.

"There was a dispute between two parties in the same community regarding an old rivalry and litigation... members of one party killed the girl with a sharp weapon. A police complaint was filed and the accused have been booked," Kaushambi Superintendent of Police, Brijesh Srivastava, said.

The horrific incident took place at the Dherha village. The police have sent the woman's body for a post-mortem examination and have formed teams to arrest the accused, Mr Srivastava added.

The murder has triggered a predictable political row in the BJP-ruled state. The opposition Congress' state office posted a brief video on X (formerly Twitter) showing police covering the woman's body.

"In Kaushambi, two brutes publicly killed a girl by cutting her with an axe. One criminal had come out on bail just two days ago in a murder case. The other was accused of raping the same deceased girl."

"... brutes in UP are so fearless they have no fear of law... no respect. Here, the daughters are so unsafe that if they raise their voice about their stolen honour, they may even have to lose their lives," the opposition party said in its post, ""When will this darkness of the dark city go away?"

The murder has once again focused attention on the UP government's record on preventing crimes against women. And it comes just two months after Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath declared 'Yamraj (the Hindu god of death)' would exact retribution against anyone who harassed or harmed women.

The Chief Minister's grand remark came after a teen was killed in UP's Ambedkar Nagar district.

Two men on a motorcycle pulled on her clothes as she was riding a bicycle, causing her to fall and be hit by an oncoming vehicle. Police said she died on the spot.

According to data from the National Crime Records Bureau, UP recorded over 56,000 cases of crimes against women in 2021 - the most of any state. This includes, rape, rape and murder, and acid attacks.

Only the Palestinian Authority can run Gaza after the Israel-Hamas war is over, European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said on Saturday.

"Hamas cannot be in control of Gaza any longer," Borrell told the Manama Dialogue, an annual conference on foreign and security policy in Bahrain.

"So who will be in control of Gaza? I think only one could do that - the Palestinian Authority," he said.

Hamas was democratically elected in Gaza strip.