Following the deaths of six Israeli hostages, including an American citizen, in California, both the Israeli government and the Palestinian militant group Hamas are signaling hardline stances, posing a difficult new challenge for the Biden administration.
For weeks, U.S. officials have said they are close to a final deal between Israel and Hamas that would at least temporarily halt the war in the Gaza Strip and allow for the release of hostages held by Hamas. At the same time, it would bring freedom to some Palestinians held captive by Israel and allow more desperately needed aid to reach Gaza.
But intractable disagreements over who and how many should be released on each side, and over a full withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza, prevented a deal — and that was before the latest hostage massacre.
The United States is continuing to negotiate, but not with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who President Biden said Monday is not doing enough to secure the hostages’ release.
Instead, the US president said the US contacts were with “colleagues in Egypt and Qatar,” two countries that have direct ties to Hamas officials.
State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said Tuesday: “We are working around the clock to reach an agreement on this.” He declined to comment on Netanyahu’s apparent rejection of elements of the deal. “We certainly believe this is an urgent matter.”
Tuesday afternoon’s news that the Justice Department announced terrorism charges against Hamas leaders is likely to add further uncertainty to the negotiations. The leaders face charges in connection with the militant group’s cross-border attack on Israel on Oct. 7, which killed nearly 1,200 people, including a plot to kill American citizens.
As the war enters its twelfth month, Gaza is on the brink of a major humanitarian catastrophe. According to health officials in the territory, who do not distinguish between civilians and combatants, at least 41,000 Palestinians have died. Almost the entire population of 2.3 million people has been displaced along the coast and entire cities have been bombed into piles of rubble.
The initial success of the talks — the U.S.-brokered deal last November that temporarily halted fighting in Gaza and freed more than 100 hostages — is now a distant memory. Of the roughly 250 hostages seized on Oct. 7, Israel believes about 100 hostages remain in Gaza and that at least a third have already been killed.
The grieving families of six hostages, who Israel says were shot in the head last week during a military operation near them, have expressed hope that the violent deaths could be the catalyst for a deal to free the remaining captives.
John Paulin, the father of Berkley native Hersh Goldberg-Paulin, said in a eulogy for his 23-year-old son on Monday that for months the family had been “looking for the proverbial rock from which we can save you.”
“Maybe, just maybe, your death will be the stone” that can help bring the rest of the hostages home, he told thousands of mourners.
“I really hope this is a turning point,” said Gil Diekmann, cousin of Carmel Gat, one of the dead hostages, expressing a similar hope as he spoke to reporters hours before her funeral on Monday.
But amid the national grief, neither Netanyahu nor Hamas has given the slightest public indication that any move is imminent.
Mara Rudman, a former special envoy for the Middle East at the State Department, said a big part of the problem is that neither Netanyahu nor Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar have any motivation to end the war.
“From the beginning, Netanyahu and Sinwar are the two people in this equation whose interests are not aligned with reaching a ceasefire,” he said in an interview.
His analysis is chilling: Sinwar does not care about Palestinian deaths because his goal is to incite international protests against Israel and internal unrest within the country, and Netanyahu is primarily concerned with his political survival and avoiding jail, given the criminal charges against him. He would be at risk if he agrees to a ceasefire deal opposed by his right-wing coalition partners.
In a televised news conference on Monday evening, the Israeli leader, referring to intransigence, declared that Israel’s military control over a narrow strip of territory on Gaza’s border with Egypt, known as the Philadelphia Corridor, is non-negotiable.
Netanyahu said the nine-mile strip of land Israel seized control of in May was Hamas’s “oxygen and supply channel.”
“The Axis of Evil needs the Philadelphia Corridor,” he said. “We have to control it.”
Hamas, for its part, has sought to disabuse Israel of any notion that hostages can be freed by military force, such as an Israeli raid in June that brought four hostages from the overcrowded Nuseirat refugee camp to safety. Palestinian officials said dozens of civilians, most of them women and children, were killed in the Israeli attack.
In a post on the messaging app Telegram on Monday, the head of Hamas’ armed brigades appeared to suggest that an execution protocol be established if Israeli forces are suspected of approaching.
“Following the Nuseirat incident, new instructions were given” to those guarding the captives, according to a statement issued under the name of Abu Obeida, a nom de guerre.
Israeli authorities interpreted the statement as a threat to kill the hostages if Israeli soldiers were nearby, and the killing of six people as a heinous example of that intent.
Netanyahu is under the strongest public pressure in months to reach a deal. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis flooded the streets of communities across Israel on Sunday after the killing of six people was revealed, and organizers called for mass protests to continue every night.
The protesting crowd chanted slogans morally accusing the prime minister of killing the hostages, and some waved signs depicting him with bloody hands. But many of Netanyahu’s loyal supporters believe his commitment to an unprecedented military campaign is the best way to confront Hamas, ensure Israel’s security and, perhaps, ultimately, free the hostages.
In a sign of division over how to proceed, areas of the country where support for Netanyahu is strong largely refrained from taking part in a general strike called Monday by the country’s largest labor federation.
While Netanyahu still enjoys the loyalty of most of his cabinet, including hard-liners who insist on continuing with all-out war, the country’s security establishment, particularly his defense minister, Yoav Gallant, has openly questioned and accused him of his stance in the negotiations and has done so in the background of looking for excuses to reject the deal.
The Prime Minister’s recent actions at the border have also sparked intense editorial comment.
Analyst Zvi Barel wrote in the Haaretz newspaper: “The Philadelphia route evokes a highway paved with the corpses of hostages.”
However, Netanyahu is well aware that many Israelis derive visceral satisfaction from the military’s hunt for the perpetrators of the atrocities in southern Israel on October 7.
Nearly everyone present was shocked by the killing of Gil Taasa, a father of two, by militants in the Netiv Haasara community, one of many Israeli villages attacked that day. An attacker threw a grenade into the shelter, killing her as she tried to protect her two young children.
A widely seen video showed the aftermath: Two bloodied children lay dazed in their living room when the attacker accidentally grabbed a bottle of Coca-Cola from the family’s refrigerator.
On Tuesday, the military said a man in the video, identified as Ahmed Fazi Wadia, a Hamas commander, was killed in an airstrike in Gaza City along with seven other militants.
Military decisions about when to carry out such attacks are usually made only at the last minute, even when planned in advance, and often depend on many factors. But coincidental as it was, the reported timing was symbolic for some: Saturday, the day the hostages’ bodies were discovered.
Times writers King and Wilkinson reported from Tel Aviv and Washington.
