Hamas holds all the hostage cards

Negotiating with terrorists has always been anathema to successive US administrations. Yet President Biden himself has taken a leading role behind the scenes in forging the agreement between Israel and Hamas , designated a terrorist organisation by the US in 1997, for the release of a first batch of 50 hostages held in underground tunnels in Gaza since October 7. The remaining 190-200 hostages will now be subject to future deals in which Hamas will have the controlling hand, providing their military commanders with maximum leverage over the Israeli government and, as a consequence, also over the US. However this is interpreted, it is not an ideal situation. But it does underline one crucial reality after six weeks of war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza: freeing the hostages by military means must have been assessed as too risky both for the hostages and for the Israeli commandos who would have carried out the mission. Doing a deal with Hamas became the only practical option and that is to the Gaza terror organisation’s advantage, something which their leaders would have planned for and anticipated before the October 7 brutal assaults on Israel took place. They may also have anticipated that Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, would come under such pressure to get the hostages released, most of them Israeli citizens, that he would have no alternative but to negotiate, through the good offices of the Qatari government. Hamas can now be expected to exploit the hostages in every which way to try and frustrate and stall and, ultimately, stop the Israel Defence Forces from continuing the attacks in Gaza. Key to this planning would have been the selection of hostages. Hamas grabbed women and children as well as male civilians in order to generate maximum emotional outrage, creating the greatest possible pressure on Tel Aviv, and Washington, to negotiate on their terms. The kidnapping of Israeli soldiers would have been crucial to their thinking. The soldiers are likely to be the last to be released because of the high value placed on each one of them by the Israeli government. It’s classic terrorist pragmatism. In 2011, Israel agreed to release 1,100 Palestinian prisoners, including Yahya Sinwar, the organisation’s current leader in Gaza, in exchange for just one Israeli soldier captured in a cross-border raid in 2006. With up to 40,000 members, according to CIA estimates, including at least 60 currently in Israeli jails, Hamas will attempt to dictate its terms, forcing Israel to agree continuous pauses in the fighting, leading to an eventual permanent ceasefire. The US state department includes in its definition of terrorist activity, “the seizing or detaining and threatening to kill, injure or continuing to detain another individual in order to compel a third person (including a governmental organisation) to do or abstain from doing any act as an explicit or implicit condition for the release of the individual seized or detained”. Political and military reality has forced both Israel and the US to discard this golden rule in dealing with a terrorist-designated organisation.