HOW THE HOSTAGE CRISIS COULD ENDInside the secret talks between Hamas leaders and Israel
The Israeli military and political leadership are beginning to see the results of a carefully planned end game that will be murderous—there is no other word for it—to the members of the Hamas military now being hunted down in the tunnels and rubble of Gaza City. The orders are to shoot to kill on sight. The collapse of the military wing of Hamas has given the group’s political leadership, who claim to have not been directly involved in the planning for the October 7 massacre, a chance to demonstrate their good will and save their own lives by arranging for Israeli hostages to be transferred to a basement in the besieged al-Shifa hospital, long a stronghold of Hamas. Some Israeli officials fear that time is running out because it’s not known how long the air in the tunnels will be breathable. A possible breakthrough, if that is the right word, concerning the hostages emerged in secret talks between Israel and Yahya Sinwar, a onetime prisoner of Israel who now directs the political wing of Hamas. Sinwar publicly announced on October 28 that Hamas was ready for what he said would be an “immediate” prisoner swap with Israel in return for the release of all Palestinian prisoners now in Israeli custody. The Hamas leader and his colleagues have been told that survival is possible if they release the Israeli hostages and agree to begin holding immediate war-crime tribunals. The Israelis want the death penalty for those Hamas combat leaders who encouraged and then did nothing to stop the war crimes of their fighters. “The Hamas political leadership was not involved in the massacre,” an American official told me, “and the thought was that if they agree to try their own people and order them executed, they will be given their lives while also exonerating Israel for the war. We’re holding out clemency for the Hamas political leadership—giving them a chance to surrender the hostages and cling to life by moving them to the hospital.” One key member of the Hamas political leadership, Sinwar’s predecessor Ismail Hanyieh, left Gaza with his family before the October attack took place. A significant factor in the talks, the American official said, has been the Hamas horrors that involved the raping, mutilation, and murder of Israeli civilians, including the very young and very old, who were left unprotected by the Israeli military during the ten or so hours of rampage on October 7. Graphic evidence of the unimaginable brutality was recorded by iPhones and GoPro head cameras and relayed in real time by the Hamas fighters to family and friends in Gaza and the West Bank, and is now gradually being released by the Israeli government as worldwide condemnation mounts of Israel’s retaliatory bombing of Gaza. Those unopposed attacks, at last count, had led to more than ten thousand deaths and worldwide rage and demonstrations protesting the Israeli decision to target the civilians of Gaza—an assault seen as a war crime by many. Hundreds of thousands marched Saturday in Washington, Berlin, Santiago, Rome, and London calling for an immediate ceasefire. The concept of an Israeli-instigated war-crimes tribunal amid a bombing campaign that has flattened much of Gaza may seem out of a bad novel but an Israeli expert on the region, who knows of the seriousness of current hostage talks, surprised me by depicting Sinwar as someone “who could be open to a deal. “He is a fanatic and an ascetic,” the expert said of Sinwar, who served twenty-two years in an Israeli prison for murder. “Dedicated to the cause. No family, very religious but got very friendly with Shin Bet [Israeli internal security] guys while in prison and was seen as not irrational. He will want a chance to give service to the cause. He will be open to a door.” Sinwar also became fluent in Hebrew while in prison. The expert predicted that Sinwar, along with some of the Hamas officials now in Qatar, “would want any deal to include a commitment that Israel would not come after them if a deal is made.” Evidence of Sinwar’s publicly promised prisoner deal—his initial offer called the release of the Israeli hostages to be traded for thousands of Palestinian prisoners now in Israeli jails—is the hoped for flow of the current Israeli hostages to their much safer, drier, and healthier quarters below ground in Gaza’s Al-Shifa hospital. I was told that water and food would be available. At the time of writing the Israeli infantry, aided by the bombing, is in the process of either blowing up Hamas tunnels or sending in combat units, accompanied by dogs trained to sniff out human beings, with the mission to kill Hamas soldiers on site or to force others to the surface where they are being shot on sight. The two hundred Hamas soldiers who were captured during or in the aftermath of the October 7 attacks “were not interrogated nicely,” I was told by an Israeli combat veteran, and they have provided higher numbers—an estimated 35,000 fighters, total—of the Hamas fighting force than were known to Israeli intelligence, adding to the many questions left unanswered by the attack. The requests by President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who recently visited Tel Aviv, for a bombing “pause” were rejected out of hand by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli military leadership. One knowledgeable American official told me that a ceasefire and a pause are seen by the Israeli leadership as the same thing: a halt in the bombing. I was further told that one general in the Israeli command headquarters in Tel Aviv noted any bombing pause at this point will only be “to reload.” As the Israeli bombing and ground attack continues—Gaza City is now under siege from the North, East, South, and the Mediterranean Sea—Sinwar and his political wing colleagues also have been told that their own chances of survival will improve if they continue to ensure that the Israeli hostages, now believed to total 248, are moved to relative safety in the hospital. “Thirty-one of the hostages are seventy years and older—one is said to be a Holocaust survivor, and two are infants, aged four months and eight months, with no mother or father, and twenty-three under eighteen years of age.” The Israeli who relayed those numbers to me said that the International Committee of the Red Cross “has not been pressuring Hamas to grant them access to the hostages, although it did seek almost immediate access to the two hundred Hamas prisoners in Israeli custody.” Meanwhile, the Hamas soldiers still alive in the tunnels underneath Gaza will be suffocating soon from a lack of fresh air, as there is little fuel left to run the generators necessary for a constant flow of oxygen. Food will be getting rancid and water supplies may be running low. The more than two hundred miles of tunnels will inevitably become a death trap, making life below ground as difficult as it is above. “Hamas must begin to release the hostages,” the American official said. |