The Hostage Deal is the Price of Israel’s Failures
The sacrifices of this proposed agreement are the cost of Israel’s weakness on October 7
Israel is on the brink of striking a deal with Hamas. After more than a year of on-and-off negotiations, hours ago came the news that Hamas’s military leader, Mohammed Sinwar, had approved the agreement.
The deal is complicated and is structured in three phases over a 42-day period. In the first phase, which can begin as early as Sunday, Hamas will release 33 hostages—women, the aged and infirm, and children, among them the Bibas babies. The subsequent two phases will see the release of all 98 hostages, living and dead, and the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the entire Gaza Strip. The war will officially end. But the fulfillment of the second and third phase is contingent on the successful implementation of the first.
Should it succeed, the deal will be greeted cacophonously in Israel. Boundless joy will mix with anger and pain, relief with fear and searing disappointment.
Rallies in favor and protests against the deal enveloped Tel Aviv and Jerusalem on Tuesday night. Broadly speaking, the Israeli left in Tel Aviv supports ending the war in Gaza in exchange for the release of hostages. The Israeli right welcomes the hostages’ return, but insists that Israel prioritize winning the war.
In Tel Aviv, crowds flooded the streets calling on the government to “seal the deal” and asking “how much blood must be spilled” before it does. In Jerusalem, demonstrators claimed the government had no mandate to “surrender” to Hamas. “A freed terrorist is tomorrow’s murderer,” right-wing opponents of the deal bellowed as they blocked traffic near the prime minister’s office.
Such discordance is inevitable.
From day one—October 7, 2023—Israel’s twin goals in Gaza were fundamentally irreconcilable. Israel could not, as its leaders pledged, simultaneously destroy Hamas and secure all of the hostages’ release. The terrorists who regarded the hostages as the key to their survival would hardly give them up for less than an Israeli commitment to end—and therefore lose—the war. Israelis, for their part, were torn between those who felt that they could not send their children to the army as long as hostages remained in captivity and those who held that, if Hamas wins, Israel will not have an army at all.
Still, Israel believed that by increasing military pressure on Hamas, it could compel the terrorists to free the hostages. The strategy appeared to work when, in November 2023, Hamas released 105 of its 251 hostages in exchange for a weeklong ceasefire and the freeing of 240 Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails. Israel reasonably assumed that ratcheting up its operations in Gaza, especially in Hamas’s Rafah stronghold, would yield similar results.
But Hamas thought otherwise. Surprised by Israel’s determination to resume fighting after the ceasefire and convinced that mounting international condemnation of the war’s conduct would soon force the Israelis to surrender, the terrorist group dug in its heels. Israeli forces would enter Rafah and several refugee camps, kill senior Hamas leaders, and dispel the terrorists’ hope of the opening of a second front with Hezbollah in Lebanon—yet no new hostage deal ensued. Hamas still insisted on an unlimited ceasefire and a complete Israeli withdrawal from the strip. Instead of buckling to military pressure and releasing hostages, the terrorists shot them.
The schisms within Israeli society meanwhile deepened. Tens of thousands took to the streets weekly not to protest Hamas’s inhumanity but their own government’s alleged intransigence. Prime Minister Netanyahu, they claimed, desperate to preserve his coalition with radical rightists opposed to any deal, blocked it by adding unreasonable preconditions. Netanyahu, they protested, doomed the hostages. Only the Biden administration, an often-fierce critic of Israeli policies in Gaza, placed the bulk of the blame on Hamas.
Other Israelis, mostly from the right, applauded the government’s refusal to accede to an agreement that rewarded terror and guaranteed Hamas’s victory. Many of Hamas’s leaders, they recalled, among them October 7 mastermind Yahya Sinwar, were released in previous hostage-for-prisoner exchanges. The terrorists freed in this deal, its opponents predict, will kill countless Israelis in the future.
Yet now, suddenly, a breakthrough deal is looming. Both Israel and Hamas have reportedly softened their positions and bridged formerly insuperable gaps.
What has changed? Although the White House deserves credit for persevering in the hostage-release talks, the deal probably owes much to the soon incoming president’s threats to visit “all hell” on Hamas and his ability to press Netanyahu.
President Biden could say “don’t,” and everybody in the Middle East—Iranians, Arabs, and Israelis alike—did. Not so with Donald Trump. One meeting with his special Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff reportedly persuaded Bibi to accept conditions he had long rejected. No wonder Trump is taking credit for the deal and dubbing it “epic.”
Still, if and when the ceasefire breaks down, the Israeli government is counting on the Trump administration’s unbridled support in completing the destruction of Hamas. Hamas is banking on international action to prevent the war from reigniting. Most of the world will applaud.
The response of the Israeli public will, by contrast, be fragmented. While the vast majority will celebrate the homecoming, their joy will be tempered by the unspeakable tortures the hostages suffered and their long, if not endless, road to recovery.
While 33 hostages will be released in the first stage, dozens—alive and dead—will remain in Gaza, prolonging their families’ suffering. The relatives of those killed by the Palestinian terrorists now going free will also be shattered. So, too, will the Israelis who still see soldiers dying in Gaza almost daily while Hamas rocket fire continues. What were all of Israel’s sacrifices for, they will ask. As with previous deals, this one will only encourage further terror and hostage-taking, they’ll warn, and set the stage for a future attack, like October 7.
Perhaps this outcome was unavoidable from the beginning. Perhaps the deal is the only way of reconciling Israel’s mutually exclusive goals of annihilating Hamas and repatriating the hostages. Perhaps, despite Israel’s subsequent military triumph, this is the price for the failures of October 7.
This article originally appeared in The Free Press on January 15, 2025.
Israel needs this inevitable and awful deal. And Israel needs the death penalty for terrorists.
The failure of October 7 is impossible to "correct" as it is so massive and tragic. I am, however, hopeful that this "deal" does not signal the end of the war, and there is a deeper strategy at play here. Sadly, the hostages that will be released during phase 1 are most likely the only hostages we get as there might not be phase 2. Was the outcome inevitable? Yes, given how many hostages were taken and the price Israel has to pay to return them. That was the "wisdom of Hamas," as explained by Matti Friedman, who brilliantly demonstrated the terrorists' winning strategy and the West's weakness and inability to understand Islamism within its borders and globally. Team Biden's tight bear hug and its constant demand to resupply Hamas with "humanitarian aid" ensured that Israel could not win. Truly heartbreaking.