This Editor’s Note was sent out earlier Wednesday in ToI’s weekly update email to members of the Times of Israel Community. To receive these Editor’s Notes as they’re released, join the ToI Community here.
In his speech on Friday, US President Joe Biden set out many of the core elements of Israel’s latest hostage-ceasefire proposal to Hamas. Some of the specific language, including the constructively ambiguous Clause 14, have also made it into the public domain.
Other potentially crucial details, however, are not definitively public as of this writing — including whether Israel has rejected Hamas’s demands, as expressed in the document issued by the terror group a month ago, that it be allowed to choose the 150 life-term terrorists who would go free in return for the release of five female IDF soldiers; that all those murderers and orchestrators of murder be allowed to return to the West Bank; and that all terrorists rearrested since their release in the 2011 Shalit exchange also be freed early in the first phase of the deal. If accepted, these demands have the potential to enable Hamas to open a third front against Israel: the West Bank.
Israel’s defense establishment is conscious of the danger. Indeed, Hamas has been reminding Israel of the danger in recent weeks, acknowledging responsibility for shooting attacks by its gunmen in the West Bank on targets in the Emek Hefer area of central Israel, including the town of Bat Hefer, a short distance from Tulkarem. At full stretch fighting Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in south Lebanon, the IDF has nonetheless been required to significantly bolster its deployment in that area of the Israel-West Bank front.
Nonetheless, the defense establishment, whose senior echelons are aware of all the specifics of the Israeli proposal, is firmly supportive of the terms conveyed to Hamas via Qatari mediators late last week. The two declared goals of the war were to dismantle Hamas’s military and governance capabilities, and to bring home the hostages. The IDF and security services regard freeing the hostages as the most urgent priority and, as was the case with the weeklong truce in November that saw 105 hostages freed, is adamant that it can resume its battle against Hamas as and when necessary.
As things stand, the IDF considers that it is making significant progress in fighting against Hamas in Rafah and in tackling the terrorist government’s multitude of smuggling tunnels along the Gaza-Egypt Philadelphi Corridor — two of the prime remaining goals of the military campaign.
As Biden noted in his address, “If Hamas fails to fulfill its commitments under the deal, Israel can resume military operations.” That’s precisely what the defense establishment expects to happen. Were Hamas to indeed free all the hostages and, beyond improbably, end “this war that they began,” and were we then to enter “a better ‘day after’ in Gaza without Hamas in power,” to again quote Biden, so much the better.
Along with the strategic goal of bringing home the hostages, the defense establishment regards the hostage-ceasefire proposal as a potential regional strategic achievement — notably because of the path it offers to normalization with Saudi Arabia, wider regional integration for Israel, and an enhanced coalition against Iran.
The deal could also yield calm — though not the defanging of Hezbollah — on the northern border, where the fighting has been escalating inexorably, where 60,000 Israelis are unable to return to their homes, where the summer heat has enabled Hezbollah’s rockets and drones to spark vast and devastating fires, and where the IDF has been readying for a much greater escalation that could turn much of Lebanon into another Gaza but also cause widespread devastation in central Israel. (The IDF will do whatever its political masters require, but would emphatically prefer that any major operation against Hezbollah not develop into a full-scale war; it would end with an agreement of some kind anyway, and Hezbollah would not be destroyed, runs the thinking, so far better to avoid it.)
What’s important to stress, however, is that Israel’s key political leadership — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and fellow war cabinet minister Benny Gantz — broadly shares all these assessments as regards the Israeli proposal. Otherwise, of course, the war cabinet would not have unanimously endorsed it. The top political echelon, too, regards the return of the hostages — the vital imperative to save as many of our people as possible before it’s too late — as strategically central to the post-October 7 recovery, coherence and resilience of the nation.
Netanyahu’s closed-door talk in the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee on Monday of “gaps” between Israel’s position and the offer as presented by Biden, and the prime minister’s repeated public insistence that Israel will not end the war with Hamas until the terror group is destroyed and will not agree to any deal to the contrary, was self-evidently designed to try to minimize opposition to the proposal from the two far-right parties in his coalition, Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionism and Itamar Ben Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit.
Given that Netanyahu has relentlessly capitulated to those party leaders ever since he began putting together his coalition after the November 2022 elections — placing them at the heart of his government, giving the would-be West Bank-occupying Smotrich a ministerial role in the Defense Ministry and placing the pyromaniacal thug Ben Gvir in charge of the police — it should come as no surprise that he continues to try to appease them. What is surprising is that he believes he has any prospect of doing so.
Ben Gvir opposed even November’s truce-for-hostages deal, in which Israel released a relatively paltry 240 Palestinian female and underage security prisoners, many of whom had not been convicted of offenses. There was no way on earth that he would back the current proposal.
That’s not to say Ben Gvir and Smotrich would follow through on their threat to bring down the coalition. But it’s far from clear that Netanyahu would be politically destroyed even were they to try to do so. And, as both Gallant and Gantz have publicly underlined, existential national interests must in any case take precedence over narrow personal and political considerations.
All of the above is moot, however, given that the proposal — Israel’s final offer, to quote official sources briefing Israeli media on Tuesday night — is now in the hands of Hamas. And whatever Hamas’s exiled leaders may have to say about it, the only decisionmaker is the man who orchestrated the October 7 invasion and slaughter in southern Israel, who retains hope that the conflict on the northern front will escalate into a full-scale conflagration, and who is confidently expecting to set the West Bank alight as well.
Yahya Sinwar is a barbaric, would-be genocidal monster, but he’s no fool. And he has proven that he’s in no hurry. Biden and his administrative colleagues have all struggled to explain why Sinwar might take the deal, since it appears to provide for the broad demise of his terrorist government, and have intimated that the narrower goal might be to at least secure the release of living female, elderly and unwell hostages in the deal’s first phase.
Were Sinwar to ostensibly accept the deal, therefore, for all that Israel’s security establishment and its key political leaders recognize the urgent need to bring home the hostages and the array of wider strategic benefits, it’s a sadly safe bet that we will not be moving serenely toward some kind of relative tranquility unseen since October 7.