The final 20 living Israeli hostages held in Gaza by Hamas have returned home as part of an emotional exchange that also freed nearly 2,000 Palestinians from prisons in Israel, as part of Donald Trump’s push to end the two-year war in the Palestinian territory.
The landmark agreement represented the US president’s most significant foreign policy success of his second term, which he used to lay out his grand vision for broader peace in the Middle East.
The long-awaited handovers on Monday sparked jubilation in both Israel and Palestine, and came as Trump visited Israel and Egypt on a whistle-stop trip to tout a 20-point plan to end the deadliest war in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.