MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
People in Israel and the Palestinian territories are waking up to very different realities today.
A MART脥NEZ, HOST:
The last 20 surviving Israeli hostages were freed by Hamas, and nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners were released by Israel.
MARTIN: Joining us to talk about all this and the many challenges ahead is NPR international correspondent Aya Batrawy. Aya, good morning.
AYA BATRAWY, BYLINE: Good morning, Michel.
MARTIN: So we heard the celebrations in Tel Aviv yesterday when the hostages were released. So tell us about the release of Palestinians later in the day.
BATRAWY: Well, more than 1,700 of those nearly 2,000 Palestinians were people from Gaza who were sent back. Some of them were journalists, doctors, first responders who were taken by soldiers from hospitals and off the streets. And they were sent to prison, held incommunicado. And now, after the release, they were showing signs of torture and abuse on their bodies, of severe malnutrition. Others were struggling to walk. NPR reporter Anas Baba was there to witness their return to Gaza. Have a listen.
ANAS BABA, BYLINE: It's a mix of joy, and at the same time, it's a mix of survival for those who survived this war. It all blends with tears here. We can see the prisoners and also the families. They are just embracing each other with, at the same time, big smiles and, at the same time, tears all over their cheeks.
BATRAWY: And those tears are also because some of these men have no homes to return to. They'll be sleeping in tents. That's for most of them. And others came out of captivity to find out their families are gone, like this man captured in a video shared by journalists in Gaza.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (Non-English language spoken, crying).
BATRAWY: Michel, he's keeling over with his forehead on the ground, weeping for his kids that he just found out were killed in an Israeli airstrike while he was in captivity. He says one of them was 8. Another one was 5. Another one was just about to turn 2 in a few days. They're among the more than 20,000 Palestinian kids the Health Ministry in Gaza says were killed in Israeli attacks in this war.
MARTIN: And, Aya, President Trump was in Israel yesterday, as we all saw. He also met with world leaders in Egypt, where he made promises that his plan to end the war marks the start of peace in the Middle East. So can you just tell us what you can about what comes next?
BATRAWY: Well, currently, Israeli troops are still occupying and holding a little more than half of Gaza's territory, and they will not be withdrawing from that until Hamas disarms. But there are questions about whether the group will agree to storing their offensive weapons or handing them over. Will it be Egypt that oversees that process? So we still have a lot of questions unanswered about that. There are still at least 11,000 Palestinians also being held in Israeli prisons right now and an unknown number of people from Gaza still being held. There are also families in Israel who want the 24 bodies of their loved ones who were killed in captivity in Gaza returned for proper burial. A search team will be assembled for that.
MARTIN: And as we've all seen, the destruction of Gaza is immense. It's going to take a lot of money and a lot of time to rebuild. Do we have any sense of what's immediately next for Gaza?
BATRAWY: Well, at a base level, humanitarian aid and commercial goods are finally flowing back into Gaza, with hundreds of trucks cleared to enter every day now to bring in far more food, medicine, tents and even cooking gas, finally. But who's going to govern Gaza now after Hamas? Trump's plan says he will oversee a Board of Peace chaired by the former British prime minister Tony Blair, but it's unclear what role they'll have, who else will be on that board or how Gaza will be built, what it'll look like.
And as I speak to you, there's an open street war in parts of Gaza City between Hamas security forces and militias and clans that have been publicly backed by Israel. So that vacuum of power will need to be filled by Arab forces and a retrained Palestinian police force. And Trump's plan also, Michel, does not address the West Bank or the creation of a Palestinian state. So the root of the conflict remains unresolved.
MARTIN: That is NPR international correspondent Aya Batrawy. Aya, thank you.
BATRAWY: Thank you, Michel. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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