Headlines were rife last week with the brilliant and devastating surprise beeper attacks on Hezbollah members throughout Lebanon, and some reportedly in Iraq and Syria. This landed Hezbollah the largest blow it has experienced in years.
And while the US, Qatar, and Egypt, the mediators of the hostage and ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas, put out various announcements and statements saying that talks are progressing – and are nearly complete – the dragging out is breaching beyond unbearable and unacceptable to ludicrous.
If you read announcements from military and defense officials, they will confidently say that Israel is winning against Hamas, which is now barely functional as an organized group.
Yet, with those successes – so much so that troops have been rerouted to the North – rockets are still being fired at the South, and it is still unsafe to live there.
Soldiers are still dying in combat, with four in Rafah this past week.
It shouldn’t need to be said, but perhaps some have forgotten in the fog of the Northern front that there are still 101 innocent hostages being held in death tunnels in Gaza, now for nearly a year.
Negotiation teams are working night and day, yet there is no final deal on the table at the present time. The disinformation is out of control, and the people in the room where it happens are scrambling.
Hamas’s handbook
Part of Hamas’s handbook – inspired and led directly by Iran – is to divide Israeli society where it hurts it the most: in its underbelly.
This was the case even before the war with the aggressive push for judicial reform legislation. Sadly, it seems like they are succeeding.
The focus and priority of the government has been the military and the security it provides. That is what dictated the next steps all along the way.
This past week, the wind of focus shifted North.
When government officials say that there are three main goals – disabling Hamas as a military and governing power, bringing the hostages home, and returning the displaced residents to their northern towns and cities – they can’t all be priorities at once.
Something’s gotta give, and when both Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant made sure to make public statements this week that the goal of returning the northern residents to their homes is of utmost urgency, that goal just slid up the scale in terms of weight on the next decisions.
This is not to take a stance on which goal is more noble, or more important. It is merely to note that the focus and energy of this government, and the bodies of manpower it commands, cannot truly be split equally.
When reports emerged this week that a possible hostage deal is under consideration that would do away with phased stages, and return all 101 hostages at once, this was a light in the tunnel of darkness for the hostage families and former hostages.
That is, until it was shown to be false, with statements to the like both from Gallant and Maj.-Gen. (res.) Nitzan Alon, the military official overseeing the hostage.
The report was rare and meaningful in a way we hadn’t seen in a long time, so much so that it brought both hostage family forums together in a statement of blessing.
So, while all of the attention moved to the North, the hostage families were given a punch in the gut, hope for a second that was very soon crushed, after months and months of being told that negotiations were underway.
The sad fact is that the hostages are fading from the national consciousness and ethos. Tragically, civilians who see the issue as partisan and people in power have shown – whether it was intentional or not – that the hostages are simply not the priority. Over 350 days is a long time to keep such momentum going.
Leaders will have to answer for this one day – to explain why this took so long. Was it Hamas, which took its time, the Israeli government, the American mediators who didn’t understand the Middle Eastern mentality, or all of the above?
The hostages used to unite us, then they divided us – and now they are fading into memory.
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