Just days before US president Joe Biden is set to leave office, Israel and Hamas have reached a ceasefire deal after 15 months of war in Gaza.
The Israeli cabinet approved the deal in the early hours of Saturday morning local time, which the Qatari prime minister announced as a three-phase agreement, set to take effect on Sunday. It will include the release of hostages still held in Gaza in exchange for Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails.
The US, Egypt and Qatar have repeatedly tried to secure a ceasefire ever since the conflict began on 7 October 2023, with both Israel and Hamas rejecting multiple draft proposals.
Here, The Independent takes a look at some of the most significant moments of the war since it began.
Hamas, which has controlled the Gaza Strip since 2007, invaded southern Israel, killing around 1,200 people.
The group broke through the border fence and used paragliders and speedboats to attack Israel by land, air and sea, as gunmen took over Israeli military posts, civilian kibbutzes and a music festival.
More than 250 people, including the bodies of some of those killed, were taken back to Gaza, according to Israeli officials.
Israeli defence minister Benny Gantz vowed that Israel would wipe the Palestinian militant group “off the face of the earth” as prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu forged an emergency government to direct the war against Hamas.
After Israel’s war cabinet ordered a complete siege of Gaza in the wake of the Hamas attack and launched air stikes on nothern Gaza, the Israeli military told residents of Gaza City, where more than 1 million people lived, to move south.
Pictures showed people packing their belongings into cars, onto donkeys and into trucks as they made a perilous journey south to Khan Younis.
Over the course of the next weeks, Israel evacuated most of northern Gaza, beginning a process that was repeated twice more over the next year, with hundreds of thousands displaced in makeshift camps.
The Israeli military expanded its ground operations despite warnings from the administration of US President Joe Biden that a full-scale assault could cause heavy civilian casualties.
Israeli tanks rolled into Gaza City – an operation the Israeli military said was necessary to dismantle Hamas’s vast subterranean network of tunnels.
A few days later, evacuations began at the Rafah crossing, from Gaza to Egypt, for thousands of foreign passport-holders.
