EXCLUSIVE — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s dependence on hard-right parties for a slim governing majority has left hostages held by Hamas vulnerable to politicians who are indifferent to their fate, the brother of an Israeli American captive fears.
“Not only are we not their [political] base, they see us as their enemy within Israel,” Lee Siegel, an Israeli American citizen whose brother, Keith, was taken captive by Hamas during the Oct. 7 attack, told the Washington Examiner during a Monday video conference. “They see us as counter to what they believe needs to happen in Israel, and, as they call it, Greater Israel.”
Keith Siegel, a North Carolina native who followed his brother to Israel in 1980, will turn 65 on Wednesday, almost exactly seven months after Hamas terrorists attacked his home in the Kfar Aza kibbutz near the Gaza Strip. The days leading up to that milestone have been spent in anxious anticipation of Hamas’s response to a ceasefire proposal that Secretary of State Antony Blinken has called “extraordinarily generous” — and apprehension that Netanyahu would yield to pressure from his hard-right flank to abandon the talks and launch the long-threatened attack on the city of Rafah, on the southern border of the Gaza Strip.
“Most of us families of hostages feel like we are being held hostage by the two most extreme religious settler parties in that coalition,” Lee Siegel said from his home in central Israel. “Even one of them leaving the coalition leaves the government at risk. … So we bounce back and forth between these two extremist parties, throwing nails and bombs into the air and trying to leverage their already rather significant hold on the government.”
Within hours of that conversation, Hamas announced their long-awaited “acceptance” of a ceasefire proposal communicated by the Egyptian and Qatari officials mediating the negotiation. Israeli officials countered that Hamas rather had offered a counterproposal with “far-reaching” demands, mislabeled as the previous Israeli offer as “a ruse intended to make Israel look like the side refusing a deal,” an Israeli official told Reuters.
Caught in the middle of that diplomatic welter are the 133 surviving Israeli hostages held by Hamas, including Keith — a father of four with five grandchildren — and four other Americans.
“He is a very sensitive person. He is very generous,” Lee said of his brother. “He is very engaging. If he were in a room with you, and there were 10 other people, and he was speaking with you, you would know that he’s speaking with you. … He loves music — loves folk music — hard rock, rock — even though he was born in ’59, he could have been a child of the ’60s, you know, a teenager of the ’60s, let’s say — and, a very loving man.”
That affection was apparent in a proof-of-life video released by Hamas last week that featured Keith and another hostage, Omri Miran. Siegel, whose wife Aviva was taken into captivity with him and then released during a short-lived truce in November, wept after mentioning his “very, very beautiful memories of Passover last year, when we all celebrated together.” Throughout the war, Israeli officials have condemned the hostage videos as “a cruel psychological manipulation” by Hamas, which released the latest footage in an apparent effort to stoke U.S. and Israeli pressure on Netanyahu to yield to their conditions for a ceasefire.
“The fact that he broke down, for me, is a sign that is still in touch. I mean, he’s not a robot … the messaging was probably what he was told to say. It’s not at all clear to us that he has any exposure to what’s going on in Israel,” Lee Siegel said.
The needs of the hostages exert little apparent pull on Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, and their faction of hard-right lawmakers. As Blinken’s team stressed the need to review the Hamas response before commenting — “We have only received the response in the last hour, 90 minutes,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller told reporters during a Monday briefing — Ben Gvir was prompt to insist on a policy course.
“There is only one response to Hamas’s tricks and games — an immediate order to conquer Rafah, increase military pressure, and continue to crush Hamas until it is utterly defeated,” the national security minister — who was rebuked by Blinken’s team in 2022 for “celebrating the legacy of a terrorist organization” founded by his mentor, Rabbi Meir Kahane — said Monday.
That recommendation comes just days after Ben Gvir and Smotrich issued a number of thinly-veiled threats to leave the coalition — a move that would likely bring down Netanyahu’s majority, forcing him to call new elections at an unfavorable moment — if he were to strike a deal with Hamas. Another member of their faction, Settlements and National Projects Minister Orit Strock, accused Netanyahu of endorsing a compromise that would “throw [Israel’s war aims] in the trash to save 22 people or 33 or I don’t know how many.”
To some extent, the tension reflects an ideological divide between hard-right lawmakers and the communities attacked on Oct. 7. The kibbutz movement is a historically left-wing ideological project, an attempt to establish “communal settlements” reflective of the most idealistic socialist aspirations. Lee Siegel moved to Israel in 1976 as part of that communal effort; his brother, Keith, followed four years later. And although the kibbutzim would establish agrarian communities, they were careful to lay down roots only within Israel’s internationally-recognized borders of 1948, rather than venture into the territories that Israel gained during the 1967 war.
“When we decided where we were going to go … No. 1 on our list was. … We’re not going into occupied territories,” Lee Siegel said, referring to the labor Zionist group with which he migrated to Israel. “That was our ideological [commitment]. We will not break that.”
Ben Gvir, by contrast, is the leader of an “ultra-nationalist and anti-Arab” political party that favors “complete Israeli rule between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea … [and] opposes the creation of a Palestinian state,” according to the Jewish Virtual Library. His core constituency is the Israeli settler movement, a right-wing community controversial for their determination to build settlements in the territories that the United Nations and international observers generally have sought to reserve for a prospective Palestinian state alongside Israel.
Strock argued that Netanyahu is poised to make so many concessions to secure the release of an initial tranche of hostages that “in return for the others, you’ll have nothing left to pay, except really the complete end of the war.” Yet the tone of their remarks reinforced long-standing suspicions that the fate of the hostages is taking a backseat to the government’s pursuit of a “total victory” over Hamas.
“I do not want to think that Prime Minister Netanyahu does not want my brother home alive. I can’t think that,” Lee Siegel said. “When I hear three of his ministers continually repeating their message that the hostages actually are not worth the price, and are a disruption to total victory, and he does not step up and shout them down — that leaves doubt in my mind.”
Those doubts may be fanned by international criticism of Netanyahu’s stated determination to conduct a Rafah operation. Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi faulted Netanyahu for “jeopardizing the deal by bombing Rafah.” But the Israeli war Cabinet, which includes Netanyahu rival Benny Gantz, was unanimous in approving the Rafah operation and also sending a negotiating team to Cairo, where officials from Egypt, Qatar, and the United States are working to coordinate talks between Israel and Hamas.
“We will never let up in our efforts to return our hostages,” Gantz said Monday. “The military action in Rafah is also an inseparable part of our continued efforts and commitment to return our hostages and change the security reality in the south. We will continue all efforts until we bring them home.”
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Lee Siegel allowed for the possibility that “what has started is posturing … just another piece in the negotiating puzzle.” In the meantime, he waits, and his brother waits, like so many other families across Israel and the world.
“Our borders need to be secure, but first and foremost, all the citizens of Israel need to know that their government is there to protect,” Lee Siegel said. “And protecting means to bring Keith and the other hostages home alive. Anything other than that is a nonstarter for me.”