A former senior intelligence officer in the Israel Defense Forces said recently that people need to “forget about” the hope of liberating all the hostages that terrorist group Hamas is still holding in Gaza.
Speaking with i24News this week, Raphael Jerusalmy said that Hamas was in “no hurry” to release the Israeli hostages they’re still holding. He added that the negotiations are “just a game” to please the White House and Qatar.
As he said:
“They [the IDF] know that nothing is happening, and we are now trying just to know whether the Hamas means business in any way, or is just please, the Qatar and the, even the White House by kind of seeming to negotiate, but not really negotiating at all. It’s just a game.
“That’s why there was a lot of leeway given to the Israeli delegation to be, like, willing to offer quite a lot of stuff just to test the willingness of the Hamas to progress.”
He added that all of this seems to be “very hopeless right now, for the simple reason that in the mind of the Hamas, time is in their favor, is playing in their favor.”
The more Hamas drags this on, Jerusalmy said, the better chance they’ll have to regroup and redeploy resources. As he continued:
“They [the IDF] think that time is of the essence in a way. And there’s no hurry to liberate hostages. In any case, they will not liberate all of the hostages. We can forget about that.
“We can only hope for a partial intermediary solution of some hostages being liberated for a very high price that we are willing to pay, long truth, liberating hundreds of terrorists.”
One of the biggest challenges in the negotiations, Jerusalmy said, is that authorities in Israel would have to decide which of the Hamas terrorists they would want to “liberate” in exchange for the hostages that Hamas is still holding.
Of course, there’s a significant danger and risk to this, as the individuals that Israel chooses to release could threaten Israelis in the future, since they’re terrorists.
Earlier in the month, Vice President Kamala Harris said that an “immediate ceasefire” was necessary in Gaza, which came as Israel was in Egypt for peace talks. Not long after those negotiations started, though, Israel backed out because Hamas wouldn’t confirm which of the hostages they were holding were still alive.
Last week, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said during a trip to the Middle East that the “gaps are narrowing” in the ongoing negotiations between Hamas and Israel. Those talks are being held indirectly, though, as they’re being brokered by the U.S., Qatar and Egypt.
These negotiations have been going on for a few weeks now, but haven’t made significant progress to where an actual ceasefire has taken place.
Blinken said Israel put forth a “strong proposal” to Hamas last Wednesday, but that the terrorist group ultimately rejected it.
