For nearly two years, Hamas had been explicit about its terms: without an end to the war and a full withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza, there would be no release of the remaining hostages.
As far as Hamas was concerned, its captives were the only form of leverage it had over Israel. Or so it long believed.
Yet in recent months, some within its ranks had started to question the wisdom of that strategy. Holding the hostages had done little to deter Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, from waging a devastating and unrelenting war that left Gaza in ruins.
Several interlocking factors explain the abrupt change of course that led Hamas to finally release the hostages who had languished in its tunnels for 736 days: exhaustion, weakness, mounting regional pressure and growing confidence in Donald Trump, the US president, to hold Israel to its word.
But, according to Arab and Western diplomats, the most decisive reason lay in a shift in Hamas’s calculus. Far from being an asset, the hostages had become a liability – and freeing them offered the group its best chance of survival.
Hamas ‘under pressure to compromise’
That realisation coincided with a wider shift in the region. Even once sympathetic Arab states had grown exasperated with Hamas’s intransigence and were rallying behind the US plan to end the war. Suddenly the group found itself without allies and under mounting pressure to compromise.
Hamas negotiators who travelled to the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh last week for indirect talks with Israel about Mr Trump’s 20-point peace plan were therefore more malleable than before.
“We came to make our case but to an extent we were pushing against an open door,” said one Gulf official familiar with the negotiations. “Hamas was not opposed to the principle of releasing the hostages. What they wanted were meaningful guarantees that the war would not restart – and reassurances they could trust the Americans.”
The deal on offer fell far short of Hamas’s hopes. Even Arab officials were dismayed by how lopsided Mr Trump’s plan had become. Last-minute revisions to the draft hardened demands for Hamas’s unconditional disarmament while allowing Israel to maintain a military presence in the Strip. It was less a ceasefire deal than an ultimatum to surrender.