The news of the deal between Israel and Hamas announced early Wednesday morning has brought respite to the families of the hostages set to be released. Around 50 hostages, apparently including women and children, will be released over a four-day pause in the fighting in exchange for more than three times that number of Palestinian prisoners. But, as only a fifth of the total number of hostages are set to return—leaving nearly 200 in the Gaza Strip—the mood among many Israelis remained bleak.
The news of the deal between Israel and Hamas announced early Wednesday morning has brought respite to the families of the hostages set to be released. Around 50 hostages, apparently including women and children, will be released over a four-day pause in the fighting in exchange for more than three times that number of Palestinian prisoners. But, as only a fifth of the total number of hostages are set to return—leaving nearly 200 in the Gaza Strip—the mood among many Israelis remained bleak.
“We are counting down the seconds until we can hug our loved ones again,” Noam Dan, whose nephews are expected to be released, told Foreign Policy. “Once this initial deal is done, the path forward is clear; we need more mediation to get the rest of the hostages home. We won’t rest until that’s the case,” he said. Dan’s brother-in-law, the father of his nephews, was also abducted.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office announced that the Red Cross would have access to the remaining hostages and supply them with medical treatment. Yet uncertainty lingers over their fate, and over the fate of Gaza’s residents. Will the brief humanitarian pause turn into an enduring cease-fire as international pressure grows against Israel, or will Israel resume bombing next week?
The current deal makes provisions for future releases. The pause can be extended if Hamas needs time to gather hostages in the custody of another more extremist group called Islamic Jihad or local gangs.
Fadi Quran, the campaigns director for Avaaz, a nongovernmental organization that is calling for a cease-fire in the interest of children on both sides, said that after the release of the first set of 50 hostages, there would still be 30 civilians among those still captive in Gaza.
In a statement, Qatar’s Foreign Ministry (which helped broker the deal) said that “the number of those released will be increased in later stages of implementing the agreement.” Israel said that there will be a one-day extension of the truce for every 10 additional hostages released.
“My understanding is that for every hostage the pause can be extended, and there is going to be a significant push by many countries, many institutions, to turn this into a cease-fire,” Quran said. “In addition, many hostage families would call for mediation process to be extended until all of hostages are released.”
One effect of the deal could be an increase of domestic pressure on the Israeli government to secure the release of the remaining hostages. Some experts also believe that the pause in fighting could prompt foreign governments, in light of the mammoth death toll in Gaza, to call on Israel to announce an enduring cease-fire and stick to it. The Scottish Parliament, for example, voted for an immediate cease-fire on Tuesday and called for an end to Israeli bombing of the Gaza Strip.
But there has been no consistent push by any major Western power to stop the fighting. And considering the high levels of support across Israeli society for decisively eliminating Hamas as a political and military entity, a cease-fire is likely to remain elusive.
“It is a terrible dilemma for the Israeli government and Israeli society,” Eran Lerman, Israel’s former deputy national security advisor, told Foreign Policy. “But the IDF is fully capable of resuming the fighting once this current pause is over.”
A day before the agreement was reached, Israel Defense Forces spokesman Jonathan Conricus told Foreign Policy over the phone that “whenever the pause expires, we will resume our operations.”
At least one poll carried out suggests that 70 percent Israelis want the objective of the war to be to “eliminate Hamas,” but others display a more complex public view. A survey by the Israel Democracy Institute revealed that 37.8 percent of those surveyed want Israel to negotiate with Hamas over the release of the hostages in Gaza, “but should not halt the fighting.”
More than a dozen people interviewed in southern Israel—including many of the kibbutzniks who long called for peace with Gaza but ironically became targets of Hamas’s attack and were forced to flee their homes—told FP that they didn’t feel safe returning home until Hamas was eliminated, although they admitted that may jeopardize future releases of hostages.
It will be the government’s job to decide how to reconcile these goals.
The Israeli government worries that Hamas will drag out the negotiations for future releases for years as it has in past cases, effectively leveraging the hostages’ lives so that Hamas can survive the conflict. But Israel seems to be unwilling to grant Hamas anything resembling a victory in the war. Instead, its strategy is to pressure the group militarily into releasing the remaining hostages.
Hamas’s strategy, meanwhile, has been to induce fear among Israelis that in the relentless bombings in the Gaza Strip, Israeli captives may also be killed. Israeli officials have dismissed Hamas’s insinuations and called it psychological warfare. “Hamas is painting a false picture,” Conricus said. “Hostages are their life insurance—an extremely important asset,” he said, indicating that it was in Hamas’s interest to keep them safe.
Israel’s Western partners have called on the country to respect international law, but neither the United States nor the European Union have backed a cease-fire. A senior EU official told FP on the condition of anonymity that “cease-fire is still not on the table” for the EU, “since there is no consensus on it.”
“Some member states argue that it is difficult to call for a cease-fire if Israel is still under attack—hostages are being held and rockets continue to be launched,” the official added. The EU position is still, however, calling for “humanitarian pauses.”
There are many groups of hostages. The men and the soldiers are particularly at risk of being the last to be freed and are likely to be swapped for senior Hamas leaders in Israeli prisons. Most of the families want their loved ones to be released at the earliest possibility, even if that means releasing hardened Palestinian prisoners, but some others see merit in the Israeli government’s approach of a relentless military campaign to pressure Hamas into releasing hostages.
In the heart of Tel Aviv a few weeks ago, thousands of Israelis gathered to demand that their government bring back the hostages immediately. There were heart-wrenching scenes—people crying in solidarity with the families of hostages, family members crippled with pain and yet mustering the strength to protest, friends bearing witness and sharing the details of the minutes and hours around the abductions. “Now, now, bring them back now,” thousands chanted in such unity that the ground underneath their feet reverberated.
Liri Albag, 18, was abducted from Nahal Oz army base on her first day as a soldier. “Hamas posted her video on Telegram—that’s how we found out she was alive,” her father, Eli Albag, told Foreign Policy. “‘They are shooting but I am OK,’ that was her last message.”
Her family was visibly distraught and angry at the government for not sharing any information on negotiations. Yet her father felt the government was on the right path.
“If they release our children, I will send flowers. But that’s not how this is happening. Maybe we send missiles to build pressure, so they understand,” Albag added. “Last time they kidnapped one soldier, they negotiated for five years, and we had to release 1000 murderers for one,” he said in reference to the negotiations for the release of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. “We are not ready to wait five years now.”
As time passes, the relatives of hostages may change their views on the best approach to bring back their child. For now, the Israeli government is already taking credit for the deal and said that it was its extensive military operations that led Hamas to the negotiating table.
But some activists say that the Israeli government ignored the possibility of a deal for weeks in order to pursue its military goals in the Gaza Strip. “The Israeli military continued to feel it didn’t achieve its goals, or its deterrence, and that any pause would limit the momentum,” said Quran, the campaigns director for Avaaz.
An estimated nearly 14,000 people have been killed in Israeli bombings in Gaza and the heavy destruction that they unleashed. But Netanyahu has emphasized that this is not the end yet. “We are at war—and will continue the war,” he said on Tuesday, shortly before the deal was announced. “We will continue the war until we achieve all of our war aims: To eliminate Hamas, return all of our hostages and our missing, and ensure that there is no element in Gaza that threatens Israel.”
The world may soon learn whether Israel can remain so emphatic in the face of rising pressure to end the fighting.
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