Chemical and thermal freeze-out of the hadronic fireball formed in symmetric collisions of light, intermediate-mass, and heavy nuclei at beam energies between 0.8A GeV and 2.0A GeV are discussed in terms of an equilibrated, isospin-symmetric ideal hadron gas with grand-canonical baryon-number conservation. For each collision system the baryochemical potential µ B and the chemical freeze-out temperature T c are deduced from the inclusive π 0 and η yields which are augmented by interpolated data on deuteron production.With increasing beam energy µ B drops from 800 MeV to 650 MeV, while T c rises from 55 MeV to 90 MeV. For given beam energy µ B grows with system size, whereas T c remains constant. The centrality dependence of the freezeout parameters is weak as exemplified by the system Au + Au at 0.8A GeV.For the highest beam energies the fraction of nucleons excited to resonance states reaches freeze-out values of nearly 15%, suggesting resonance densities close to normal nuclear density at maximum compression. In contrast to the particle yields, which convey the status at chemical freeze-out, the shapes of the related transverse-mass spectra do reflect thermal freeze-out. The observed thermal freeze-out temperatures T th are equal to or slightly lower than 1 T c , indicative of nearly simultaneous chemical and thermal freeze-out.PACS numbers: 24.10. Pa, 25.75.Dw