Israel Declares Gaza Hostage Crisis Over as Cease-Fire Enters ‘Phase Two’ and Rafah Crossing Reopens—Narrowly

As mourners filed past the flag-draped coffin of Ran Gvili in central Israel this week, leaders declared the country’s long hostage nightmare over.

“For the first time since 2014, there are no Israeli citizens held hostage in Gaza,” President Isaac Herzog said Monday. “An entire nation prayed and waited for this moment.”

Across the border in the Gaza Strip, where more than 2 million Palestinians have endured more than two years of war, siege and a fragile cease-fire, the same development is being cast as the start of something very different: a tightly controlled experiment in reopening Gaza’s main gateway to the world.

With the recovery and identification of Gvili’s remains, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government says it will move into “phase two” of a U.S.-brokered cease-fire, beginning with the partial, highly restricted reopening of the Rafah crossing with Egypt. The crossing, seized by Israeli forces in May 2024, has been largely closed to regular traffic ever since.

Israeli officials present the moment as a turning point. For Palestinians in Gaza, the early contours of phase two suggest a more modest change — a narrow crack in a border that remains firmly in Israeli and Egyptian hands.

Hostage file “closed”

Gvili, 24, was a police officer on medical leave who rushed to defend Kibbutz Alumim when Hamas-led gunmen stormed southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. He was killed in the fighting, and his body was taken into Gaza, reportedly by militants from the smaller Palestinian Islamic Jihad group.

Over the following two years, Israeli forces waged a punishing campaign in Gaza as mediators brokered a series of limited truces and prisoner exchanges. By October 2025, all remaining living hostages had been freed under a phased deal that traded their release for Israeli withdrawals and the freeing of Palestinian prisoners.

Several sets of remains were also returned over time, but Gvili’s body remained missing, becoming a potent symbol in Israel. The Hostages and Missing Families Forum, a group representing relatives of those captured on Oct. 7, often displayed his photograph at rallies with the caption “Bring them all home.”

That effort culminated late last week, when the Israeli military announced a “large-scale operation” in cemeteries in northern Gaza to search for Gvili. Troops, accompanied by military rabbis and forensic teams, exhumed hundreds of graves around the Tuffah and Shijaiya neighborhoods. Palestinian residents described graves being dug up and bodies left exposed, prompting anger and distress.

On Jan. 26, Israeli authorities said forensic experts had identified Gvili’s remains. “I promised we would bring everyone home and we have brought everyone home,” Netanyahu said in a recorded statement, calling the operation “an incredible achievement.”

“Ran Gvili, the last hostage in Gaza, has been brought home,” the Hostages and Missing Families Forum said. “First to enter. Last to return.”

The announcement allowed Netanyahu to formally declare the “hostage file” closed, clearing a key political condition his government had imposed on proceeding to the second phase of the cease-fire framework.

What phase two is supposed to deliver

Under a multistage plan drafted by U.S. officials and accepted by Israel and Hamas through intermediaries, phase one focused on recovering hostages, reducing active combat and pulling back Israeli forces from some densely populated areas.

Phase two envisions deeper changes: the gradual demilitarization of Hamas and other armed groups in Gaza; deployment of an international stabilization force; and the transfer of day-to-day civil administration to a new technocratic Palestinian body, the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, or NCAG.

The plan also links phase two to the start of large-scale reconstruction and to the reopening of key crossings, most notably Rafah on Gaza’s southern border. That crossing, the only one that does not lead directly into Israel, has long been a lifeline for Palestinians seeking medical care, education or work abroad.

Netanyahu’s office has said publicly that Israel’s agreement to any reopening at Rafah was contingent on the return of all hostages and remains. With Gvili now buried in Israel, that condition has been met.

Hamas, for its part, said the recovery of the body showed it had fulfilled its side of the bargain. Spokesman Hazem Qassem said the move “confirms Hamas’s commitment to all the terms of the agreement to halt the war… including the exchange track and its full completion,” and urged the United States and other mediators to press Israel to fully implement phase two.

A narrow reopening at Rafah

Israeli officials and diplomats involved in the talks say the first practical change will be at Rafah, but stress that the opening will be gradual and limited.

In the initial weeks, only pedestrians will be allowed to cross, and in small numbers — roughly 50 to 150 people per day, according to officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because implementation details are still being negotiated. Priority is expected to go to severely wounded and ill Palestinians needing treatment abroad, Palestinians who have been stranded outside Gaza since the crossing’s closure, some students with places at foreign universities, and a small number of family reunification cases.

No commercial cargo or bulk goods will be permitted through Rafah at the outset. Humanitarian supplies and trade are expected to continue to move mainly through the Kerem Shalom crossing into southern Gaza and, to a lesser extent, through damaged and tightly controlled crossings in the north.

Everyone crossing at Rafah will be pre-vetted under an Israeli-led security mechanism. Israel will retain inspection authority on the Gazan side of the border, which its troops have occupied since the 2024 offensive. Egypt will manage its own terminal and conduct security screening on its territory. European Union monitors are expected to return to the crossing in some form, reviving a mission first established under a 2005 agreement.

Palestinian technocrats tied to the new NCAG are slated to staff administrative functions on the Gaza side, such as verifying documents and coordinating passenger flows, once their presence is agreed by Israel and Egypt.

A gap between promises and practice

For Ali Shaath, the veteran Palestinian engineer appointed this month to lead the NCAG, Rafah is central to the broader political and economic transition promised under the cease-fire deal.

Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Jan. 22, Shaath said “the Rafah crossing will open next week in both directions” as part of what he called a new governance track for Gaza. He described Rafah as “more than a gate – a lifeline and a symbol of opportunity,” and outlined plans for his committee to coordinate aid, restart basic services and eventually oversee reconstruction.

The initial Israeli blueprint for Rafah falls short of those expectations. While it would allow limited movement both out of and into Gaza, the narrow quotas, the pedestrian-only restriction and Israel’s veto power over passenger lists mean that most of those who want or need to cross will wait months or longer.

Humanitarian organizations welcomed the prospect of any opening but said it would not, by itself, address acute shortages or the needs of tens of thousands of injured and displaced people.

“There are no more excuses now,” chef José Andrés, whose aid group operates in Gaza, said in a recent interview. “Phase two has to be happening,” he added, arguing that meaningful easing of restrictions on people and goods is essential if Gaza is to move beyond emergency relief.

Palestinian residents have expressed a mixture of hope and frustration. Thousands of Gazans are registered for evacuation for medical treatment, often after long waits. Others have been stranded in Egypt or further afield since the crossing closed and are eager to return, even to destroyed neighborhoods.

“I have my parents and brothers in Rafah and I am stuck in Cairo,” said one man reached by phone, who declined to give his full name for fear of jeopardizing his application to return. “They tell us the crossing will open, but nobody can tell you when your name will be allowed.”

Control, leverage and uncertainty

The Rafah arrangement is also being closely watched in Cairo, which objected strongly when Israeli tanks rolled onto the Gazan side of the crossing in May 2024. Egyptian officials said at the time that Israel’s presence along the frontier crossed a “red line” and raised questions about the 1979 peace treaty and a related security annex governing troop deployments in the Philadelphi Corridor.

Egypt has insisted it will not accept any moves that lead to permanent resettlement of large numbers of Gazans into the Sinai Peninsula. Officials in Cairo say they want the crossing reopened under a formula that restores a visible Palestinian and Egyptian role, while addressing Israeli demands to prevent weapons smuggling.

Beyond Rafah, some of the most consequential elements of phase two remain unsettled. Talks continue over the makeup and mandate of an international force that would deploy inside Gaza, how and when Hamas will be asked to give up weapons, and at what point major reconstruction funds will begin to flow.

Netanyahu and his security chiefs have repeatedly said reconstruction must follow, not precede, the “complete demilitarization” of Hamas. Critics of the government, including some Israeli analysts and rights groups, warn that such open-ended conditions could allow Israel to delay rebuilding indefinitely while maintaining significant control over Gaza’s borders and airspace.

Inside Israel, the end of the hostage saga is likely to intensify calls for an official inquiry into the failures that led to Oct. 7 and the conduct of the war that followed. For many Israelis, the return of Gvili’s remains is both a moment of mourning and a boundary marker between a traumatic past and an uncertain future.

For Palestinians in Gaza, the shift to phase two may be harder to see. Bombardments have largely subsided under the cease-fire, but vast swaths of the territory remain in ruins, more than 70,000 people have been killed, according to Gaza’s health authorities, and basic services are still badly degraded.

At the southern edge of the strip, the Rafah terminal stands as a concrete test of what comes next. If the narrow opening now envisioned widens over time — to more travelers, commercial trade and a measure of normal mobility — it could signal that Gaza’s long isolation is beginning to ease. If it does not, the crossing may instead come to symbolize a new phase of the same old confinement, in which the fate of millions still hinges on decisions made far beyond their border.