by James M Dorsey
Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is about scoring political points, if need be, at the expense of the lives of Hamas-held Israeli hostages and innocent Palestinians.
Backed by US President Donald J. Trump, Mr. Netanyahu’s delay of the release of 620 Palestinians incarcerated in Israeli prisons in violation of the Gaza ceasefire agreement and demand that Hamas release future hostages without stage managing ceremonies proves the point.
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The Palestinians were supposed to be released on Saturday after Hamas freed six Israeli hostages earlier in the day.
Mr. Netanyahu described the presentation of the hostages on stages where they made brief statements before Hamas handed then over to the International Committee of the Red Cross as “ceremonies that demean our hostages’ dignity and the cynical use of our hostages for propaganda purposes.”
Lost in much of the reporting of Saturday’s release was the fact that one of the six freed hostages, Omer Shemtov, surrounded by armed fighters, kissed his captors’ foreheads. Mr. Shemtov was the only one of the 29 live hostages released in the first stage of the Gaza ceasefire to do so.
Ignoring public demands to prioritise the release of the hostages, even if that requires ending the war, and the opposition of many in the Israeli military and intelligence community, Mr. Netanyahu’s most recent demands serve several purposes.
They potentially put the ceasefire at risk.
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If enforced, the demands would prevent Hamas from using future prisoner exchanges to spotlight Israel’s failure in its 15-month assault on Gaza to destroy the group by demonstrating its retention of command and control, discipline, and ability to stage events and manage public spaces.
Hamas deploys for the exchanges hundreds of well-fed fighters in crisp uniforms with seemingly well-maintained hand weapons and machine guns mounted on pick-up trucks in apparently good condition.
Forcing Hamas to release hostages in spartan, low-key handovers would weaken the group’s negotiating positions in talks on the terms of a second phase of the ceasefire and help keep Mr. Netanyahu’s ultra-nationalist coalition in place.
Mr. Netanyahu’s partners have threatened to collapse his government if the second phase negotiations, as stipulated in the agreement, produce a permanent ceasefire, a complete Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, and, by necessity, a post-war administration of the Strip that would involve the West Bank-based, internationally recognised Palestine Authority, inevitably with Hamas in the background.
Mr. Netanyahu’s demands, coupled with his delay of the second phase negotiations that were supposed to start two weeks ago, are designed to capitalise on public anger at Thursday’s glitch when Hamas returned a wrong corpse and Israel asserted that two children included in the returns of the remains of dead captives, were strangled to death, not killed in an Israeli air strike as Hamas asserts.
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Bombed Israeli busses. Credit: EPA
The bombing of three busses at about the same time in the Israeli towns of Bat Yam and Holon fuelled the anger and calls for a resumption of the Gaza war. The busses exploded at night when there were no passengers aboard.
In response, Mr. Netanyahu ordered the Israeli military to carry out “an intensive operation against centres of terrorism” in the West Bank.
“There is a sense of vengeance in the air, at an intensity not seen since the October 7 massacre. This is the sentiment that reaches the TV studios and includes calls for resuming the war, for a second Nakba, and for the total destruction of the Gaza Strip… The prime minister identifies fears and feelings of vengeance among the public and responds accordingly, with the aim of making maximum use of these for the benefit of his political survival,” said Haaretz columnist Amos Harel.
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Mr. Harel was referring to Hamas’ October 7, 2023, attack on Israel that killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and enabled the kidnapping of 251 others by Hamas and other Palestinians. Palestinians describe the 1948 expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians when Israel was established as a Nakba or Catastrophe.
While willing to take a backseat in a post-war administration of Gaza, Hamas has made life a bit easier for Mr. Netanyahu with its rejection of the prime minister’s demand that it disarms without the prospect of achieving Palestinian national aspirations and that its Gaza-based leaders agree to go into exile.
“Hamas was founded as a national resistance movement for clear goals: to get rid of the occupation, to achieve the Palestinians’ national goals of statehood, self-determination, (and) right of return., We will continue our struggle…to achieve these goals by all means, political means, diplomatic means, (and) means including armed resistance,” said Basem Naim, a senior member of Hamas’ political bureau.
“We have said many times…that we are willing immediately to leave the governing position in the Gaza Strip and to allow any Palestinian unity government or a technocratic government or any alternative which is decided by Palestinians within the Palestinian consensus,” Mr. Naim added.
Hamas has governed Gaza since 2007 when it ousted from the Strip Al Fatah, the political movement that constitutes the backbone of President Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestine Authority.
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Hamas fighters. Source: CEPA
Like Mr. Netanyahu, Hamas is caught in a Catch-22. Its political future depends in part on upholding the principle of armed struggle as long as Israel blocks the pathway to a two-state resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
With limited options for Gaza’s post-war administration, Israel’s refusal to entertain the Palestine Authority’s involvement in Gaza, let alone Palestinian statehood, and reluctance to occupy a territory populated by 2.3 million destitute Palestinians leaves Mr. Hamas with no good options. From Mr. Netanyahu’s perspective, that makes Hamas’ revived control of Gaza the best of bad choices.
That may be already happening, as Hamas’ stage-managing of the hostage releases suggests.
Mr. Netanyahu’s preference for Hamas would fit his policy for years before the group’s October 7 attack when he encouraged Qatar to fund Hamas’ Gaza administration to keep the Palestinian polity divided between the group and the Authority.
“Israel has engineered a situation in which Hamas is currently crawling out of the rubble and reasserting civil and political authority throughout Gaza on a daily basis without Israeli interference,” said Middle East analyst Hussein Ibish.
Counterintuitively, Mr. Netanyahu’s insistence on continuing the war aimed, as in the past, at cutting Hamas down to size regularly rather than destroying it, doesn’t contradict his enabling of Hamas. On the contrary, both serve his purpose.
This is where the interests of Israel and the United States’ Arab partners diverge. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, and Jordan want to see Hamas out of power because of its Islamist ideology and affinity with the Muslim Brotherhood.
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Steve Witkoff and Ron Dermer
Mr. Trump may be the joker in Mr. Netanyahu’s pack. Giving Mr. Netanyahu a free hand in dealing with the hostage issue does not prevent Mr. Trump from pressuring the prime minister to agree to a permanent ceasefire in the second-phase negotiations.
Mr. Trump could also endorse a plan for post-war Gaza governance and reconstruction that an Arab summit in Cairo in early March is expected to adopt.
Drafted as an alternative to Mr. Trump’s proposal to resettle Gazan Palestinians in Egypt, Jordan, and other countries willing to receive them, the plan reportedly calls for an administration under the auspices of the Palestine Authority populated by Gazan businessmen and notables with no ties to Palestinian political and military groups.
This week, Mr. Netanyahu sent Ron Dermer, his strategic affairs minister, confidante, and newly appointed chief ceasefire negotiator, to Washington to meet with Mr. Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, in advance of the second phase talks.
Mr. Witkoff will have likely indicated to Mr. Dermer which way Mr. Trump leans.
Dr. James M. Dorsey is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, and the author of the syndicated column and podcast, The Turbulent World with James M. Dorsey.