A ceasefire between Hamas and Israel will take effect in less than 24 hours, Qatar’s foreign ministry said on Saturday.

In a post on X, Qatari Foreign Minister Majid al-Ansari said the ceasefire would begin at 8:30 a.m. local time Sunday (1:30 a.m. ET). He advised people to be cautious when the agreement goes into effect and to wait for instructions from officials.

Early Saturday morning, the Israeli government approved a cease-fire deal in Gaza that would free dozens of hostages and end a 15-month war with Hamas, bringing the sides a step closer to ending their deadliest and most destructive fighting ever.

Despite news of a ceasefire, sirens sounded in central Israel on Saturday and the military said it had intercepted missiles fired from Yemen. The Iran-backed Houthis have stepped up their rocket attacks in recent weeks.

The group says the attacks are part of its campaign to pressure Israel and the West over the Gaza war.

Israeli attacks on Gaza also continued. The Palestinian Ministry of Health said at least 23 people had been killed the previous day.

On Saturday, Palestinian militant spokesman Abu Hamza called on the families of the hostages to ask the Israeli army to stop the attacks in the final hours before the ceasefire takes effect, saying it “would be a reason to kill their children”.

Under the first phase of the truce, 33 hostages are to be released in the next six weeks, in exchange for hundreds of Palestinians jailed by Israel. The rest, including male soldiers, will be released in a second phase that will be negotiated during the first. Hamas said it would not release the remaining prisoners without a permanent ceasefire and a full Israeli withdrawal.

According to the ceasefire plan, approved by the government and signed by Israel’s national security adviser, the exchange will begin on Sunday at 4 p.m. (9 a.m. ET). During each exchange, Israel will release the captives once the hostages have arrived safely.

The plan says that during the first phase, about 1,900 Palestinian prisoners will be freed, in exchange for 33 Israeli hostages, alive and dead. Among the prisoners, 1,167 are residents of Israeli-held Gaza but were not involved in the attacks on October 7, 2023. All women and children under the age of 19 from Israeli-held Gaza will be released during this phase.

All Palestinian prisoners convicted of deadly attacks will be deported, either to Gaza or abroad, and barred from returning to Israel or the West Bank. Some will be exiled for three years, and some permanently, according to the plan.

Key questions remain about the ceasefire – the second reached during the war – however, including the names of the 33 hostages who will be freed and who among them is still alive.

Hamas agreed to release three hostages on the first day of the deal, four on the seventh day and the remaining 26 over the next five weeks.

Palestinian detainees will also be released. Israel’s Justice Ministry released a list of more than 700 people to be freed in the first phase of the deal and said the release would not begin until Sunday at 4pm local time. All the people on the list are young or female.

Also during the first phase, Israeli troops are supposed to withdraw to a buffer zone about a kilometer wide inside Gaza, along its border with Israel.

This will allow displaced Palestinians to return to their homes, including Gaza City and northern Gaza. With most of Gaza’s population crammed into huge, squalid tent camps, Palestinians are desperate to return to their homes, even though many have been destroyed or badly damaged by Israel’s campaign.

Omri Miran was among the men taken hostage by militants who stormed Kibbutz Nahal Oz during a Hamas-led attack on October 7, 2023. His brother-in-law, Moshe Lavi, told CBC News on Saturday that Miran would not be among those be released in the first phase of the agreement.

Lavi said all the hostages should be released together, for humanitarian reasons, because of all the hardships they faced.

After 470 days of captivity, imagine that, can you believe that someone is not in humanitarian need? he said.

The largely devastated territory is set to see an increase in humanitarian aid thanks to the agreement. Aid trucks lined up Friday on the Egyptian side of the Rafah border crossing with Gaza. On Saturday, two Egyptian government ministers arrived in the northern Sinai Peninsula to oversee preparations for the delivery of aid and await the evacuation of wounded patients, the health ministry said.

WATCH | The death toll in the war could be much higher, the report said:

The number of dead in Gaza is significantly lower, according to the report

A new report published in the journal The Lancet suggests that the number of people killed in Gaza in the first nine months of the war between Israel and Hamas may be 40 percent higher than reported by Hamas officials.

Hamas sparked the war with its cross-border attack on Israel, in which about 1,200 people died and about 250 were captured. Almost 100 hostages remained in Gaza.

Israel responded with a devastating offensive that killed more than 46,000 Palestinians, according to local health officials, who do not distinguish between civilians and militants, but say women and children make up more than half of the dead.