Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is actively sabotaging the possibility of any hostage deal due to pressure from Itamar Ben-Gvir and despite Hamas having given in to Israel’s demand of no end to the war before Phase 1 of the deal, sources have told the Jerusalem Post.
Sources said that Hamas’s huge concession could have led to the deal being wrapped up this week, and that by next week some hostages would already have returned to their homes.
The underlying framework which Mossad Director David Barnea, Shin Bet Director Ronen Bar, and IDF Maj. Gen. (res.) Nitzan Alon brought Hamas to agree to some weeks ago allowed Israel to get a number of hostages (there is a debate whether the number would have been 18 as Hamas demanded or 33 as Israel demanded) back as part of a 42 day ceasefire.
If the sides did not reach terms for a final deal, Israel could then have restarted its Gaza operations, having already received a significant number of the hostages still in Hamas’s hands (estimates range from only 50-70 still being alive.)
But as the negotiations to bang out the implementation of the already agreed upon framework was coming out, Netanyahu added at least two new critical conditions which pulled the rug out from under Israel’s negotiators.
Suddenly, he demanded that Israel would never withdraw from the Philadelphi Corridor and that no armed Hamas forces would be allowed to return to northern Gaza.
Although these had been Israeli negotiating positions earlier, Jerusalem had explicitly dropped these demands in order to reach the current framework, which was the breakthrough that allowed a return to full negotiations.
Netanyahu accused of destroying deal
Sources ridiculed Netanyahu’s two new demands as irrelevant from a security perspective which meant that he cared only about keeping Ben-Gvir from toppling his government, and was proactively destroying any prospects of a deal.
According to sources, Israel had already reached a deal with Egypt to use a mix of above-ground sensors – which Israel would have control over – and a new below-ground thick barrier, to block Hamas from rearming even after IDF forces would hand the area over to a mix of Egyptian and possibly UAE forces.
Further, Hamas still has massive amounts of weapons in northern Gaza.
As such, sources said Hamas forces do not need to physically bring weapons back to northern Gaza and preventing them from returning physically armed achieves nothing other than political slogans.
Despite Netanyahu’s efforts to sabotage the talks, sources say that all of the involved negotiators will still do the best they can to move something forward, and will not quit involvement in the talks, though there is concern that this time Israel will be blamed by the US for a failure of the talks.
Despite Israel’s assassination attempt (and possibly success) against Hamas military chief Mohammed Deif, sources indicated no sense that Hamas was backing out of the talks.
In the meantime, sources acknowledge that following two major events: US President Joe Biden’s highly problematic debate performance and former US president Donald Trump’s survival of an assassination attempt, Netanyahu is more confident that Trump will win reelection and feels less pressure to align his strategic plans with Biden’s demands.
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