Reports that a new deal may be in the works with Hamas to pause fighting in Gaza and enable hostages to be released raise concerns about Hamas demands.
The first deal, brokered in mid-November, saw fighting stop for a week later that month. Hamas has suffered more losses since then, including the southern Gazan city of Khan Yunis where the IDF has been operating since early December. Yet, an ostensibly weakened Hamas appears to be requesting even more from a new deal than it got from the first one.
Let’s start with the reports. The deal is reported to include a several-month pause in fighting in return for most of the remaining hostages. However, we’ve been misled in the past about the hostages being released.
Previous Hamas lies
For instance, the first deal was supposed to include elderly hostages, women, and children. It was only revealed later that when it referred to “women” it actually meant older women and mothers and that it was always understood that younger women would be left in the hands of Hamas.
This tragic error came despite increased evidence that younger women had been abused by Hamas. Yet, their release was not prioritized.
Also, Hamas lied about releasing all the mothers and children. They purposely lied about the Bibas family, claiming they were being held by other groups or by Gazan civilians. These claims are always floated whenever hostage talks begin so that Hamas can pretend it doesn’t know where the hostages are. This creates contradictions.
Why are the talks taking place with Doha, which hosts Hamas, if Hamas doesn’t even hold all the hostages? If some of the hostages were held by Gazan civilians, then what’s the point of talking to Hamas via a third country that hosts Hamas, when the hostages could be found in Gaza in the hands of random civilians?
The public in Israel is nevertheless presented with this scenario: Hamas will do a deal for hostages, but Hamas doesn’t hold all the hostages, Hamas will find them, but if Hamas doesn’t find them, that’s ok. Then it will still get a pause in fighting to look for them or pretend to look for them, and then when it violates the deal that’s ok too because it was known all along that Hamas couldn’t find them or that Hamas was lying.
Hamas misled Israel the first time. Then there was another two months of fighting, from December 1 to January 28 and now Hamas is once again seemingly in the driver’s seat of the talks to secure even more than it did back in November.
If you’re reading this and realize something doesn’t make sense, then you’re right. It doesn’t make sense that Hamas, weaker today than it was on November 24, is seeking to get a much longer “pause” to release fewer people.
The Israeli public deserves to know why young women are at the back of the line. The story is that Hamas claims the women are all soldiers and therefore get to have a “high price” for them. Once again, that appears to show Hamas is the one driving these demands, even though it continues to lose territory and terrorists.
According to the IDF, Hamas has lost 9,000 members of its terrorist army, roughly a third, and it has also lost thousands who are injured. The Jerusalem Post reported last week that up to 60% of Hamas terrorists are out of action. On the other hand, reports also say that up to 80% of Hamas tunnels have not been destroyed. Many of those tunnels are in areas under IDF control, so finding the tunnels is only a matter of time.
But the overall point is that Hamas continues to have some command and control. It controls Rafah on the border and through that control, it controls humanitarian aid entering Gaza. Hamas may also be trying to infiltrate the 250,000 estimated Gazans who remain in the north.
The Hamas tentacles are waiting to grow back. If Hamas gets a months-long ceasefire, it could use that time to go back to the tunnels, recruit more terrorists from the people sheltering in the humanitarian zone, and exploit the aid coming into Gaza to grow wealthy and powerful once again.
These should be Israel’s top concerns before agreeing to any pause in fighting. Israel has been told that when the fighting is over Hamas won’t be in Gaza. That claim has been downgraded to: there won’t be a Hamas threat from Gaza. When the first pause in fighting took place, reports said that only military pressure on Hamas had led to the successful hostage release. Now, two months later, with additional military pressure, it appears that Hamas is stacking the deal to avoid releasing many hostages up front.
Considering the fact Hamas is the one who began this war with a genocidal attack on Israel, considering all the crimes that are already known, and considering that it violated the first deal, and has continued to use hostage videos to exploit Israeli psychologically, to grant Hamas a ceasefire of weeks or months is problematic.
It’s worth considering that all along Hamas’s plan was to attack on October 7, cause mass murder and destruction, then run back to Gaza, hide in tunnels, and wait out the war, which it expected would last maybe two months.
It did this in 2009 and 2014. Then it expected the international community to press for a ceasefire, to suffer no consequences, leaving its leadership intact, and to restore funding from abroad to rebuild its arsenal.
At the same time, it wanted to use the war to win concessions from Israel and broaden support for Hamas in the West Bank. So far the Hamas leadership is mostly intact, its terror infrastructure intact, if damaged.
Hamas is just waiting to bring in money and humanitarian aid to profit from its continued control over Gaza’s civilians, whom it uses as human shields. It thinks time is on its side; its push for a long ceasefire is evidence of this.
It may have lost 15,000 terrorists, killed and wounded, but it can replace them in time. Therein lies the danger.
Time is on its side, not Israel’s.
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