Israel’s Hostage Deal With Hamas

Last night, the Israeli war cabinet approved a hostage deal with the terrorist group Hamas. According to the Israeli government, the deal will see 50 Israeli citizens released, mostly women and children, in batches of 12 or 13 per day.

For each day of such releases, Israel will pause its current offensive against Hamas in the Gaza Strip; Israel said it would only pause its air operations for six hours daily in the north. This provision was apparently sought directly by Yahya Sinwar, leader of Hamas, who wants Israeli UAVs downed for that time period to limit Israeli surveillance — presumably to save his own skin as he tries to escape whatever rathole he is currently trapped in.

For its part, Israel insists it will still have surveillance capacity without the UAVs.

Hamas will also supposedly allow the International Red Cross access to the hostages, despite the IRC’s publicly obvious disinterest in such a mission. Israel will release some 150 Palestinian terrorists who are women and minors. In other words, a democratic government is trading terrorists for innocent women and children being held by a terrorist group. Israel will also allow additional fuel into Gaza, presumably to be stolen by Hamas.

The deal is supported by the Israeli Defense Forces, the Shin Bet, and Mossad. That support led many of the members of the war cabinet to flip from opposition to the deal to support for it. According to the Times of Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu further insisted on the potential release of more hostages, a refusal to release terrorists convicted of murder, and a commitment by Hamas to “locate” the hostages held by other terror groups in the Gaza Strip.

This last point is important: There are multiple distinct groups in the Gaza Strip reportedly holding Israelis hostage — and some of those groups are Gazan civilians who participated in the massacre of October 7. According to an unnamed government official in the Times of Israel, “Israel believes Hamas could potentially locate some 30 more Israeli mothers and children beyond the initial 50, and that the halt in fighting would be extended by a day for each group of 10 more Israeli hostages who are located and freed.”

The Israeli government released a statement adding, “The Israeli government, the IDF and the security forces will continue the war to return all the abductees, complete the elimination of Hamas and ensure that Gaza does not renew any threat to the State of Israel.”

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu explained that, after the pause, the war to eviscerate Hamas will continue.

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This deal is highly controversial inside Israel. There are two separate strains of logic being applied. On the one side, there are those who believe that as the cordon tightens around Hamas, they will start killing hostages — that Israel must do what it can right now to free hostages before that happens. They believe that Israel will be able to continue to successfully pursue its long-term goal of eradicating Hamas, even if that goal is made more difficult by Hamas’ activities during the pause in fighting. There is evidence to support this idea. Yesterday, for example, Palestinian Islamic Jihad released news of the death of one of the hostages, which they promptly blamed on Israel’s “procrastination.”

Bring the hostages home as fast as possible at the lowest cost — and then destroy Hamas. That’s the logic of those who support the deal.

On the other side are those who worry that hostage deals have always been terrible policy. They remember the 2011 Gilad Shalit deal, in which Israel obtained the release of one Israeli soldier from Hamas in return for 1,027 prisoners, including 280 serving life sentences for planning and perpetrating terrorism. Those prisoners were responsible for nearly 600 Israeli deaths. In fact, one of those prisoners released in 2011 was Yahya Sinwar, the current leader of Hamas who planned October 7.

Opponents of the deal remember when the authorities told them that security in Gaza was good enough to withstand the risk. Those authorities were obviously wrong.Opponents of the deal worry, most of all, that the current pause will be used as an excuse by the global community to pressure Israel for further “de-escalation” with a terrorist group who just slaughtered 1,200 Israelis and kidnapped another 240 — that as the focus shifts from Hamas’ evil to hostage deals, there will be a broader effort to leave Hamas in place.

Such worries are well-founded. For its part, Hamas is already claiming to have achieved such an end. Last night, Ismail Haniyeh, political leader of Hamas living at five-star hotels in Qatar, released a statement saying a “truce” was going to happen. The Arabic term for “truce” is “ceasefire.” Haniyeh hopes this will serve as a propaganda victory, telling the radical Muslim world that Hamas has somehow fought Israel to a standstill.

And many in the media are doing the same.

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Already, the media are using the possible pause, set to go into effect on Thursday, as an excuse to talk about leaving Hamas in place.

Politico published an article from Colin Clarke of the Soufan Group and Michael Kenny of the University of Pittsburgh, stating that Hamas is actually a rather nice terrorist group — that they’re “not ISIS,” have merely territorial goals, and can be negotiated with. According to Clarke and Kenny, “Unlike ISIS, some of Hamas’ goals are actually political, and so there will be no effective solution to the crisis unless it also includes a political resolution.”

That is an absurd contention given the events of October 7 and Hamas’ stated goal of repeating as many October 7 days as possible.

But that contention — that Hamas can be left in place — is being issued by a wide variety of sources as the pause begins. David Ignatius of the Washington Post hopes the hostage deal will provide a “surprisingly pragmatic formula for easing” the conflict, expanding into a “de-escalation of a nightmare conflict.”

Presumably, some in the Biden administration hope the same — that the Israelis will simply forget about what Hamas wants, what Hamas has done, and what Hamas has pledged to do, even before the bodies of October 7 have all been buried. The White House is obviously conflicted, with certain members standing stalwartly by Israel and others fretting over the possibility of Iranian aggression.

In reality, if Israel leaves Hamas in place, of course, the possibility of regional conflict grows exponentially. Hamas will rearm; Hezbollah will be emboldened in Israel’s north; terrorist groups in the West Bank will grow more violent; the Houthis in Yemen will up the ante; the Sunni countries will shy away from Israel and seek their own methods of defense, creating more opportunities for proliferation; and Iran will grow more aggressive, until they have fully developed a nuclear weapon, at which point all hell breaks loose.

Israel must re-establish deterrence and security. If they do not, Israel will find itself under violent attack from its enemies every single day.

Tape was released of a Gazan “civilian” who participated in the October 7 attacks, bragging about it.

Unfortunately, a huge percentage of Palestinian Arabs are in favor of this sort of activity by polling data. That means Israel simply cannot allow pseudo-governmental bodies with control over money and weaponry staffed and governed by such people. Israel must attain its own security.

They have no choice. Everyone in Israel, on all sides of the hostage issue, agrees on that much.

Don’t believe the media when they suggest that this hostage deal is a prelude to a broader ceasefire. It is not. Israel is making that clear and the world should remember it.