More than 200 days into Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu needs to decide what matters more: extracting ultimate revenge on Hamas, and in the process all other Palestinians in Gaza, or getting hostages back alive.
Israel has made it clear that a major assault on Rafah, the Gaza border town in which four Hamas battalions and more than 1 million civilians have taken refuge, is imminent. In a last-ditch attempt to forestall the attack, the US and 17 other countries with citizens held in Gaza made a joint plea on Thursday for Hamas to release them.
To be clear, this is a Hail Mary pass aimed at forestalling the further expansion of a war that is destabilizing the Middle East, isolating Israel, boosting anti-Semitism worldwide, damaging US President Joe Biden’s re-election prospects and threatening support for the Jewish state in its most important ally, the US.
At the same time as they prepare for a move on Rafah, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) are also changing the nature of their operations to the north. Rather than just respond to attacks by Hezbollah from Lebanon, on Wednesday, they for the first time launched a pre-emptive strike on multiple targets aimed at pushing the Iran-backed Shiite militia away from Israel’s border.
Two videos released last week show that Netanyahu is at a critical juncture. The first is a statement to camera, made under duress, by the US-Israeli hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin. The 23-year-old lost his hand from a grenade blast during Hamas’ murderous attack on the Tribe of Nova music festival, on Oct. 7 last year, and was last seen that day as he was loaded onto a pickup truck for abduction to Gaza.
This was a Hamas propaganda video. Goldberg-Polin appeared to read from a script as he called shame on Netanyahu for not caring more about the hostages. Chillingly, he also said that 70 of the remaining 133 hostages had already been killed by IDF fire. The attribution of all those alleged deaths to Israeli forces should be roundly disregarded, but the figure itself — almost twice the estimate of hostage fatalities made by Israel’s intelligence agencies — certainly came from Goldberg-Polin’s captors. They might be lying, or they could also be resetting expectations for the number that return alive in any eventual hostage release.
The second video is of a TV interview with a demobilized IDF soldier by the UK’s Channel 4. The ex-soldier, who served in Gaza, is not identified. Yet his story is compelling all the same, because it simply underscores evidence — including footage of Palestinians, and indeed of Israeli hostages, being gunned down while carrying white flags — that this is a professional army so goaded by extremists in the Israeli Cabinet, that it is ignoring its own rules of combat.
The soldier said that many of his comrades fighting in Gaza saw little difference between Hamas and civilians there, after watching ordinary Palestinians whoop and cheer when militants brought hostages — as well as the corpse of a half-naked girl — back across the border after the Oct. 7 raid.
“I think the thing here is that they [Palestinians] need to prove they are not the enemy,” the soldier told Sky. “The ground assumption is that they are Hamas, and then if you go this way you are bound to kill people that are not.”
His belief that he would carry the weight of responsibility for what he did in Gaza, and what is now done in his name, for the rest of his life is haunting. It is also a warning Israel should heed about the lasting price it might have to pay for the way this war was conducted. If Netanyahu cuts a deal to end the fighting and return the hostages, even one that falls short of the surrender he believes he needs, he can still make Hamas’ remaining leaders and fighters pay, over time.
It is even conceivable that Gaza’s Palestinians would do the job for him, once left alone with the men who brought this catastrophe on them.
“It feels like our government and their government, Hamas, they are on the same team, they essentially want this land to be soaked with blood,” the IDF soldier told his interviewer.
So long as even some Israelis think that is the case, there can be no victory over Hamas, only a cycle of killing and hate.
In the meantime, it is refreshing to see a multinational demand that for once is leveled directly at Hamas, which took the hostages in the first place and in whose hands the decision to release them and end the bloodletting ultimately resides. It is too often forgotten that this is a war Hamas began with savage intent.
Thursday’s joint statement did include some incentive for Hamas to bargain, including an “immediate and prolonged ceasefire,” and an assurance that Israel would accept the free return of Palestinians to northern Gaza as part of any hostage release agreement.
Netanyahu should lean into this opportunity, despite the backlash that would come from extremists in his Cabinet. He maintains that chasing Hamas to the ground and defeating it is the only way to get the hostages freed, but that is an assertion I suspect not even he believes, because it has not worked to date.
Since an early, negotiated prisoner exchange and ceasefire secured the release of 105 hostages, the IDF has killed at least as many as the three it has freed through military operations.
It might well be that the only way for Netanyahu to validate his claim would be to get the hostages released in a deal now. He could then reasonably argue it was the threat of imminent annihilation that forced Hamas to bend.
However, once cornered in Rafah’s tunnels, Hamas’ leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, is as likely to order the remaining hostages killed as to give up them up. That is a burden Israel’s prime minister would have to carry.
Marc Champion is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Europe, Russia and the Middle East. He was previously Istanbul bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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