Sinwar using hostages to ‘drive a wedge through Israeli society’

Israel Kasnett

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Israelis protest outside the Kirya military headquarters in Tel Aviv, demanding the release of the hostages held in the Gaza Strip, Aug. 13, 2024. Photo by Avshalom Sassoni/Flash90.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu approved on Wednesday the departure of a delegation to Doha, Qatar, on Thursday, as well as the mandate for conducting negotiations in an effort to bring Israel’s hostages home.

But it is possible that such a deal will never happen as Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar seems to prefer the negotiations as a cruel mechanism to torture Israeli society, as one expert told JNS.

Eran Lerman, vice president of the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security, said he is “not quite sure that Sinwar really wants a deal to work.”

He said Sinwar does not want to allow hostages who are alive out of his reach “since it is the one guarantee for his survival.

“He is basically using it to drive a wedge through Israeli society,” Lerman said.

As Israel’s negotiators head to Doha, it has been nearly two weeks since the killings of Hamas’s previous political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, and Hezbollah’s top military commander Fuad Shukr, and both Iran and Hezbollah have yet to act on their threats to retaliate.

Israel is still bracing for an expected attack by Iran and its network of proxies. With Hamas refusing to join negotiations for a possible hostage deal on Thursday and an Iranian/Hezbollah attack looming, the last two weeks have been fraught with uncertainty and heightened tensions over the rapidly changing security environment in the region.

Some officials hope that although Hamas has announced it would not participate in this latest round of negotiations, a hostage deal might discourage Iran and Hezbollah from attacking. But the other question is how Haniyeh’s assassination in Tehran has changed the equation, if at all.

Sinwar was always the decider

Enia Krivine, senior director for the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Israel Programs and National Security Network, told JNS that Sinwar’s replacing Haniyeh does “not substantively” change anything with regard to the talks.

“Sinwar was always the decider in the negotiations; he held all the bargaining power with the hostages under his lock and key,” she said. “The other players outside of Gaza were Sinwar’s messengers. Sinwar replacing Haniyeh simply lifts the veil and demonstrates that this was always Sinwar’s game.”

Lerman seemed to agree. 

“To my knowledge it was always his game,” he said. “He never took orders from anyone.”

Haniyeh’s assassination “doesn’t change anything,” Lerman said. “It puts more of a burden on his shoulders in terms of his situation and of his people in Gaza, which is pretty desperate, but as far as he is concerned, he wants a commitment by Israel to end the war with a Hamas victory.”

Israel’s security echelon, as well as much of the international community, seem to believe Israel can afford to release many terrorists and end the war as part of a hostage deal since Hamas, in their view, has been sufficiently weakened.

Lerman told JNS he sees why, “even if we can get some people out,” many in the defense establishment believe “there can be enough commonalities to make this work,” given that “the nature of the war has changed” and that Israel “can go for a deal without really changing the dynamics.”

Krivine acknowledged the dilemma as well, saying, “Everyone understands that releasing Palestinian prisoners is a bad idea.”

She pointed to an incident last week when an Israeli man was shot to death late last year by a Palestinian prisoner who had been released in one of the hostage deals. She also noted that Sinwar himself was released in the 2011 deal that saw IDF soldier Gilad Shalit freed in exchange for 1,027 terrorists.

“That said,” Krivine continued, “as long as there are alive hostages in Hamas’s hands, the government has a moral obligation to try to get the hostages back.

“It’s not just a moral or a political imperative, it’s a strategic imperative,” she added. “As long as the hostages remain in Gaza, Sinwar and the Iranian axis have the ability to psychologically terrorize Israelis. It is of utmost strategic importance to get the hostages back and take away the powerful leverage that Hamas holds over Israelis.”

Dealbreaker

There are confusing reports about what the hostage deal on the table actually entails and whether or not Israel and Hamas have changed stipulations and demands since the draft endorsed by President Joe Biden.

Krivine said she is unaware of what is on paper, “but now that the U.S. is trying to use a Gaza ceasefire to appease Iran and prevent an Iranian attack on Israel, I am assuming there is a lot of dealing under the table between Washington and Tehran, and that worries me.”

Lerman questioned “the modalities of making sure those who return to northern Gaza are not armed men and all that this entails.”

“Israel wants to be sure that it will not once again face a catastrophic reality in the immediate vicinity of the Gaza envelope,” he said. “If Hamas wants access for its armed people to go back to northern Gaza, that is a dealbreaker.”

He said Israel could leave the Philadelphi Corridor along Gaza’s border with Sinai “if we have a very clear, complicated monitoring system that we can feel comfortable with and if the Egyptians understand that the kind of games they’ve been playing are no longer tolerable.”

However, Lerman said he believes control of the Netzarim Corridor dividing the northern and southern Gaza Strip “is in many ways more significant.”

One of the main debates in Israel and abroad since Oct. 7 has been that since rescuing all the hostages and defeating Hamas are two opposing ideas that cannot be simultaneously achieved, Israel has no substantive options to fully achieve them both. It’s either one or the other.

Krivine said Israel must “continue to apply maximum military pressure on Sinwar, while also pursuing hostage negotiations, in the hope that Sinwar will either be killed or that he will finally agree to a deal when he feels that he has nowhere left to hide.

“The hope was that the IDF would get to Sinwar sooner, but it is only a matter of time before the IDF corners the architect of 10/7,” she said. “In the meantime, there is no indication that Sinwar will accept a deal and give up the incredibly valuable leverage he holds as long as the hostages remain in Gaza.”

For this reason, the hostage negotiations taking place in Doha are extremely important. Sinwar is watching carefully because if the talks fail and Iran uses it as an excuse to attack Israel directly and through proxies in Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen, he will have gotten his wish of seeing Israel attacked again from all sides.

With this in mind, Krivine told JNS that if Hamas “is unwilling to conclude a deal this week that brings the hostages home, there is a strong case for Israel going on the offensive against its regional adversaries.”

She said Sinwar “feels emboldened while his allies in Beirut and Tehran threaten Israel.”

“If Israel goes on the offensive and deals a bold and decisive blow to Hezbollah and the Iranian regime, it will weaken Sinwar’s position considerably,” Krivine said.

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