Everyone has their own photographs. Those of the Israeli hostages held by Hamas can be seen everywhere, from the halls of Tel Aviv airport to major road junctions, on television banners and on the front pages of newspapers and Internet websites. In a more discreet location, the office of Yehuda Fuchs, the Israeli army commander for the "central region" – the West Bank occupied by Israel since 1967 – is filled with photos of Hamas executives: Yahya Sinwar, the movement's political leader, Mohammed Deif, the head of its armed wing, and others less well-known figures - between 50 and 100 people, according to the Israeli daily Yedioth Aharonoth. Major-General Fuchs knows these faces: From 2016 to 2019, he was commander of the Gaza Division, which watches the Palestinian enclave.
All of Israel is caught between these two demands: Bringing the hostages back alive, while promising to kill their captors. According to a poll commissioned by the Israel Democracy Institute, over 90% of Israelis want the release of the abductees, the destruction of Hamas and the restoration of deterrence. But the country's most right-wing population sees the first of these goals as contradictory to the other two. And Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself is not impervious to the tension between these two camps.
The Israeli leader wants to maintain his grip on the Israeli right but faces stiff competition from Yoav Gallant, the defense minister on the offensive, and his most radical allies in the coalition, notably Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir. On Channel 14 – the mouthpiece of the radical right – Ben-Gvir declared that the exchange agreement was a "disaster." He voted against it, along with his party's MPs. "Hamas wanted this time-out more than anything else," he added, recalling that when French-Israeli hostage Gilad Shalit was freed in 2011, over a thousand Palestinian prisoners had been released, including Sinwar – an agreement supported at the time by Netanyahu. Gallant repeatedly argued that the ferocity of the Israeli offensive, which Hamas claims has resulted in the deaths of almost 15,000 Palestinians, is what enabled the current release to be negotiated from a position of strength.
For the time being, Ben-Gvir's hard-line positions have served him well: His party, Otzma Yehudit ("Jewish Power"), is holding its own in the polls, while the Religious Zionist Party led by Bezalel Smotrich, the coalition's other supremacist representative, who voted for the agreement with Hamas, has for the first time fallen below the electoral threshold to obtain seats in the Knesset, in the polls. As for Netanyahu's Likud party, it is no longer Israel's largest party, coming in second behind National Unity, an opposition coalition led by Benny Gantz and Gideon Sa'ar.
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