HAMAS'S ALAMOWith Al-Shifa Hospital in the IDF’s sights, a new opening emerges for an exchange of hostages and prisoners between Hamas and Israel—and a possible settlement of the war
Hamas, with its leadership in flight and its fighters surrounded and outgunned in sniper fire near the still standing hospitals in Gaza City, has begun talking about an exchange of Hamas prisoners in Israel for the hostages it captured in its surprise terrorist attack on October 7. The initial proposal went nowhere but Israeli officials were more than willing to talk. The last minute Hamas offer suggested that many of the hostages are still alive. The initial Hamas offer was a nonstarter. Hamas proposed that it would release a total of 113 hostages that would include women, the elderly, the young, and foreigners. In return it asked for the release of 240 jailed Hamas women and teenagers. The offer came with a condition: that the hostages would not be released until the Hamas prisoners were delivered into the hands of a foreign entity. Israel immediately rejected the offer, a knowledgeable Israeli insider told me, “because we don’t believe anything Hamas says.” He added, however, that Israel was continuing to talk with Hamas about an exchange. The change in approach came on a day in which Israel learned that the two major leaders of Hamas, Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas political leader in Gaza, and Mohammed Deif, its military leader, had fled Gaza City for the south. “The do-or-die leadership are not ready to die,” the Israeli insider told me. The offer came after a day of a sniper fire near Al-Shifa Hospital and five other targeted hospitals in Gaza City. “There was no need to bomb now.” There was another reason Israel was reluctant to make the trade. The continuing collapse of the Hamas tunnel system—a result of the constant Israeli bombing—has left clues suggesting where the Israeli hostages might be kept. There was pressure from the Israeli special operations community to consider a Entebbe-style raid that could free the hostages without bargaining. There was yet another offer from Hamas, I was told. It proposed a 72-hour ceasefire that, if agreed to, would give it time to find and recover hostages from the October 7 attack who were seized by local Gaza City residents who took advantage of the suddenly opened border to rob and steal and perhaps return home with an Israeli hostage. There could be more than a few of such souls who are still alive. At least two other terrorist groups also entered the city and came away with hostages. Negotiations about that possibility also were ongoing, the insider said. The change in tone, I was told, was a sign that the war is moving quickly toward a settlement. A knowledgeable American official told me that the talk about trading hostages for prisoners has led to hope in the American intelligence community because Hamas, “now facing surrender or death, had a last chance to get any benefits from hostages. Hamas had dismissed as cowards anyone who was not willing to die for Allah. We shall see.” The sudden breakthrough came amid earlier reports that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had written off the possibility of any last-minute hostage release talks and was committed to the annihilation of Hamas, even if it means the possible use of riot control gas, with its dire history for the Jewish state, in the labyrinth of tunnels that are being systematically sealed off by the Israeli Ground Forces. I delayed publishing the story because I was told by the American official that the surviving hostages—who are mostly Israeli but also include American, Russian, and Thai citizens—now in their sixth week of underground captivity, had moved or were being moved from the tunnel system into a second or third basement level of the Al-Shifa Hospital. The hospital, with its extensive campus, has long been known by Israeli intelligence to be a Hamas redoubt and perhaps the last existing Hamas command-and-control center in Gaza City. There were hopes, as I wrote last Sunday, of a last-minute release of some hostages—not including those with any ties to the IDF—being traded for a Hamas prisoner release. But nothing has yet materialized. “Israel is still trying to negotiate a way out for the hostages,” the official told me, “but Hamas must surrender first and bring the hostages out.” The Israel intelligence community, with its superb ability in signals intelligence, had earlier assessed that the surviving hostages may have been transferred from the tunnels to the basement of Al-Shifa. Intercepts of recent Hamas requests for medical care and drugs suggest that some of the hostages—many are seventy years of age or older—have died in captivity. The neighborhood adjacent to the hospital—some 35 to 45 blocks—has been heavily bombed, and Al-Shifa is seen, in the official’s words, as “the last stand. The Alamo. They are planning to come in shooting,” he said of the Israeli Air Force, whose mission would be to destroy the hospital, with its many wings, and expose the tunnel openings, for the follow-on infantry forces. The continued bombing is now aimed at destroying the last of the emptied Gaza City apartment and office buildings believed to mask the last available underground links to the Hamas tunnel complex. Those buildings have been the primary targets of the Israeli Air Force since the war began in the aftermath of Hamas’s surprise cross-border terrorist attack on October 7 that took 1,200 Israeli lives, including women and children and elderly victims. The Israeli response—bombings that have so far taken more than 11,000 lives, according to the Gazan Health Ministry, many of them children, and the forced relocation of untold numbers of noncombatant civilians in search of water and food to overcrowded tent cities in the south of Gaza—has been widely condemned in protest marches around the world. The marches are not in support of the October 7 Hamas attacks, but against what is seen as a disproportionate military response in violation of international law. Those inside Israel who object to the bombing are being silenced but not those worldwide, including many throughout America who have marched and protested against the Israeli bombings in Gaza. The Biden administration had done its usual waffling. Its initial support for the Israeli response—“We’ve got your back,” President Biden famously said early in the crisis—has been tempered as protests against the Israeli bombing grew. Biden made two quick trips to Israel and Secretary of State Tony Blinken has been on the road and in what has seemed a constant state of bewilderment as Netanyahu continues to do as he wishes in Gaza. CIA Director Bill Burns showed up in the Middle East for a few days, allegedly to work on the release of hostages, and Biden a few days ago dispatched Brett McGurk, the National Security Council coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa, to the region to discuss the same matter. When asked of the impact of those visits, the informed official, who has worked on Middle Eastern issues for decades, responded cryptically: “Bibi to those three blind mice: ‘Shaddup already.’” The official explained: “There is a power vacuum in Washington. No one is running the show” while America is continuing to ship as many as one thousand bombs daily to Israel. “It’s chaos in the White House. They are saying the same things over and over. They are doing what they think will get the president re-elected. He is a George the Third. It’s scary, and it is disgraceful.” Netanyahu, fearing a guilty verdict in a now delayed criminal trial, clearly is determined, along with the generals in charge of the war in Gaza City, to rid Israel of Hamas and ride the war to another term as prime minister while never spending a day in jail. The IDF, a well-equipped and well-trained military, now more than 520,000 strong, including 360,000 recently activated reservists, is constantly tightening the noose. Hamas fighters living underground are facing increasing danger in what is left of Gaza City. “Contrary to all the worries,” the informed official told me, “on the ground it’s turning out to be a piece of cake.” The IDF, he said, “is operating under very highly controlled fire discipline. They are destroying structures that previously were bombed” to ensure the tunnels below were no longer usable and thus “cutting off access to the sea and to the north and south” for the many thousands of Hamas fighters sealed below. Israel intelligence learned from its interrogation of the approximately two hundred Hamas fighters who were seized during the October 7 attack that their estimates of Hamas’s strength—twenty thousand or so—may have been off by as much as ten thousand fighters. And now, he added, “Gaza City now has the look of Hamburg in 1943.” Once the fighters were isolated, I was told, the initial Israeli plan was to flood the tunnels with CS tear gas and explosives. CS is an enhanced form of tear gas that is widely used as a riot control agent. It could also save the lives of Israeli soldiers if and when they storm the tunnel systems. “Just wait for the reaction world wide if they gas Hamas in the tunnels in this last act,” the official said. “The mystery for me is why people don’t understand that this is for keeps, whatever it costs the Israelis in casualties or criticism from those who dismiss the horror of October 7.” At this point, any journalist would immediately turn to Hamas for its view, but I have been unable to find a way to obtain comment. Hamas has told former New York Times reporter Chris Hedges, then in Cairo, as he wrote in a recent Substack column, that its military win had destroyed more than 160 Israeli vehicle targets in Gaza in recent days, including twenty-seven tanks. Hamas officials also told Hedges that they had ambushed Israeli ground troops near the Al-Shifa Hospital. I was unable to confirm either of those statements. The Israeli insider, who is a combat veteran, scoffed at the reports, telling me that only forty-one Israeli soldiers had been killed since the offensive began. He acknowledged that one Israeli tank had been put out of action by a Hamas fighter but noted there had been a lack of hand-to-hand combat. “Israel has been surprised at how little fighting the Hamas soldiers put up,” he said. The media-savvy IDF have been providing a constant stream of briefings and reports to television and print journalists from around the world who flew to Israel to witness what most expected to be the last hurrah of Hamas, the Islamic resistance group whose following grew as the forward-looking Oslo Accords, promulgated in 1993, were steadily undermined by Israeli governments. Hamas stunned Israel on October 7 by breaking through the walls and fences separating Gaza City from dozens of kibbutzim and small farming villages in the south of Israel. The early morning raids came, with no response from the IDF for as long as eight hours, as an all-night rave, attended by many hundreds of young Israeli men and women, was ending. The Hamas atrocities, including rape and murder, began there and went on for hours throughout the villages and kibbutzim nearby. Hundreds of IDF soldiers were killed in their quarters and others were taken prisoner. Netanyahu has promised an inquiry but the focus from his Tel Aviv headquarters has been not on an inquiry to find out what went wrong, but on payback in Gaza. Netanyahu is planning, at the war’s end, with the destruction of Hamas, on remaking of the governing structure in Gaza and the West Bank, which has been the site of steadily increasing settler violence triggered by the October 7 Hamas attack. A newly rebuilt Gaza City, sans tunnels, will be secured by Israeli police or military force, with a revitalized Palestinian Authority, under new leadership approved by Israel, in charge of governance in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. The tightened control would be essential for future Israeli expansion of settlement activities there. I was told one name in the mix to run the new Israeli-dominated Palestinian Authority offices is Mohammed Dahlan, a former leader of the Fatah youth movement in Gaza City. He was known for his support of the Oslo Accords and for his closeness to the American intelligence community after he was put in charge of the security forces in Gaza. His hatred of the more radical Hamas led to allegations of torture of Hamas suspects during his years in office, which ended when he was found to have embezzled untold millions of dollars in border-crossing fees. He is now living, as a multimillionaire, in the United Arab Emirates. The Israeli insider, who has current information about Netanyahu’s postwar planning, confirmed to me that Netanyahu has ambitions beyond maintaining military and police control of the Gaza Strip rebuilt without Hamas. “The plan of Israel,” he told me, after the current war in the Gaza Strip is over and Hamas is no more, “is to turn all of Gaza” into one of the areas in the West Bank that, under the Oslo Accords, is now under Israeli security control. “It will be our people,” the Israeli told me, “who will maintain security in Gaza, and our people can go in and out. The borders with Egypt will be maintained by Israel, and not by Egypt as in the past. The goal being to control smuggling into Gaza, but it will not be Gazans doing it.” The key remaining issue in Tel Aviv, he said, is “who will be in charge of the civilian control in the rebuilt Gaza?” And who will replace the ineffectual Mahmoud Abbas, who is now eighty-eight years old, as the face of the Palestinian Authority. The PA nominally is charged with administering security, among other issues, in the West Bank, but it has failed to provide security to the Palestinian population there as Israeli settlers have expanded their settlements and seized Arab-owned land in doing so. The Israeli also floated the name of Mohammed Dahlan as the potential future leader of the PA in both territories. With Hamas gone, anything will be possible for Israel and its prime minister in the Gaza Strip and West Bank. |