Humanitarian aid organizations welcomed the news that Israel and Hamas had "signed off" on the first phase of an agreement in Gaza, paving the way for a ceasefire.
The Israeli government ratified the deal on Thursday, after which a ceasefire came into effect on Friday.
Since Israel broke an earlier ceasefire agreement in mid-March, which led to an 11-week halt of all humanitarian aid entering Gaza, international aid organizations say the Israeli government has been allowing a small amount of aid into Gaza.
Many groups say that they are ready to deliver food, clean water, medicine and other provisions to the millions of Palestinians who are in need.
The Israeli government has denied that it is limiting the amount of aid entering Gaza and has claimed Hamas steals aid meant for civilians. Hamas has denied these claims.
Israel allowed humanitarian aid to resume entering Gaza in May, primarily through the controversial U.S.-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. But aid organizations that have worked inside Gaza during and before the war said GHF did not have the experience to operate effectively inside the conflict zone and more aid was needed.
Aid organizations have repeatedly called for more aid to be allowed into Gaza to meet the needs there
Organizations tell ABC News they are cautiously optimistic that a ceasefire will not only bring an end to the violence but will also result in open borders to flood aid into the war-torn strip.
"I've been in contact with my team since yesterday ... and I think we all share the same sense of relief and hope, but we've been through this before in terms of ceasefire," Joseph Belliveau, executive director of the NGO MedGlobal, told ABC News.
"We don't know where this [will go]. I just spoke to our country director there, and she was just sharing with me that this is, as she put it, an urgent humanitarian and moral imperative, referring to the ceasefire," Belliveau said.
In August, a report from the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification -- a global initiative monitoring hunger with the backing of governments, the United Nations and non-governmental organizations -- determined famine was occurring in parts of Gaza for the first time since the war began.
Children have been greatly affected by the lack of food. As of Oct. 1, 151 children have died of acute malnutrition in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health.
Meanwhile, in August, the number of children in Gaza who are acutely malnourished rose to over 14,000, with more than 320,000 children at risk of acute malnutrition, according to UNICEF.
Kate Phillips-Barrasso, vice president of global policy and advocacy for the humanitarian organization Mercy Corps, said the team has not been able to get any items into Gaza since March 2, which is when the first ceasefire fell apart and Israel ceased all entry of aid into Gaza.
She said the team distributed any items that were already in Gaza and then helped in other ways, including trucking clean water around the strip. She is hopeful that, in addition to a ceasefire, there will be an effort to flood the zone with aid.
"We have been waiting since March with something like 73 truckloads of assistance at the border," Phillips-Barrasso said. "So that's like 1,300 pallets of assistance. ... We have 14,000 hygiene kits, 4,600 food kits and over 7,000 shelter kits that are waiting. We have trucks in Jordan and we have trucks in Egypt."
She continued, "So what we're hoping is that this ceasefire, in addition to the fact that it will protect civilians ... that it will make the environment easier and safer for aid workers to provide that assistance."
Before the war, Belliveau said there were 500 to 600 trucks entering Gaza per day to meet the basic requirements of the civilian population, including food, medicine and supplies. Since March 2025, he said the number is down to 40 to 50 trucks per day, with sometimes no trucks entering.
Belliveau added that MedGlobal currently has a few trucks sitting at the border loaded with medicines and therapeutic food for those suffering from malnutrition.
"These are trucks that have just been blocked, sitting outside of Gaza ready to go in," he said. "So, just in the last 24 hours, we've been rechecking with authorities, with the drivers of the trucks, with the logistics system. The minute that we get approval and can cross in, we'll be sending these trucks in as we are super hopeful that the U.N. and many others will do."
Before the war, 36 hospitals were functioning in Gaza -- excluding field hospitals -- according to the World Health Organization. Currently, there are just 14 hospitals operating in Gaza, all partially functioning, according to the agency.
Belliveau said MedGlobal runs 16 different medical points throughout Gaza, many of which had to close over the past year due to the surrounding conflict and had to be moved.
Having to move the physical site with patients being treated can be distressing, he said.
"We've literally had to close down, withdraw, evacuate from dozens of them and try to relocate, and that relocation is incredibly disturbing," Belliveau said. "Patients who are in a hospital, or in an ICU, or in a nutritional stabilization center, in critical condition, are not able to move around. So, it's been devastating."
Meanwhile, he said colleagues in the remaining hospitals in Gaza have reported not having enough supplies, including antibiotics, anesthetics for undergoing surgery, antiseptics for cleaning wounds and gauze for dressing wounds.
Belliveau said he's hopeful that the ceasefire will allow MedGlobal to reopen facilities in the central and northern parts of Gaza, where medical services are limited.
"Can we go back? Which medical facilities can we start to reopen, even if it's with tents and with basic medical supplies, just to get some measure of health care back to those areas?" he said. "Because, as of now, there's almost no health care anywhere north of the southern areas and, of course, there's still many people trapped, obviously."
In a statement to ABC News, a spokesperson for Médecins Sans Frontières, or Doctors Without Borders (MSF), said the organization welcomed a ceasefire but added that the Palestinian population has many needs that must be met.
"The announcement of the first phase of agreement paving way for a ceasefire in Gaza brings a moment of relief for an exhausted, hungry, and grieving Palestinian population and a great relief to the families of all hostages -- but it comes after more than two years and over 67,000 lost lives," the statement read.
"While we welcome it, it does not mark the end of the suffering," the statement continued. "While access to humanitarian assistance must never be contingent on a peace agreement, any ceasefire must be followed by an urgent and massive scale-up of humanitarian aid to address the overwhelming medical, psychological, and material needs across a devastated Gaza."