Benjamin Netanyahu waited for months to send troops to Rafah, the southern tip of the Gaza Strip, where more than a million Palestinians have sought refuge from the fighting.
When the order finally came on Monday, it took only a few hours for Hamas to finally signal that it had accepted the broad outlines of a hostage-for-captives cease-fire proposal drawn up with mediators.
As darkness fell, the people of Gaza celebrated in the streets; By daybreak on Tuesday, Israel Defense Forces tanks had captured the key border crossing with Egypt and the Israeli flag flew over Gaza’s only link to the Arab world.
The decision marks one of the biggest gambles of Netanyahu’s long career. The cessation of fighting for the release of the hostages would bring Hamas – and many of its leaders, including Yahya Sinwar – into jubilation. Rejecting the agreement to advance further into Rafah would risk a fundamental break with the US and leave the fate of the hostages uncertain.
This has made the fate of the 132 hostages still held by Hamas one of the most sensitive dilemmas of Netanyahu’s tenure, with his political career and the security of the Jewish state inextricably linked. “Either Rafah or the hostages,” read one banner at a protest involving families of hostages that blocked Tel Aviv’s main street last Thursday.
Faced with these difficult decisions, Netanyahu took a characteristic tack this week: He bought time. Israeli troops went to the east of Rafah – aiming to increase pressure on Hamas – while a team of “working-level” negotiators traveled to Cairo “to explore the possibility of reaching an agreement on terms acceptable to Israel.” “said the government.
Critics of Netanyahu see his decision as a cynical ploy to appease his far-right coalition partners and prevent a hostage deal that could topple his own government; To his sympathizers, it was a calculated move to dampen Hamas’ demands.
“For him it is an almost impossible constellation, he is stuck between the different parts of his cabinet, the different parts of Israeli public opinion, between the fate of the hostages and the continuation of the war with the US,” said Nadav Shtrauchler, a political strategist worked with Netanyahu. “The political, the diplomatic and the security are all interconnected and complicated.”
During the most recent phase of the hostage talks, Netanyahu had already done much to limit the freedom of action of CIA Director Bill Burns, Egyptian intelligence chief Abbas Kamel and Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani. Deal or no deal, Netanyahu had vowed that Israel would invade Rafah – rejecting the main condition set by Hamas.
But Hamas’s apparent acceptance of the proposal had an unexpected result: it united Netanyahu with his political opponents in the war cabinet – even Benny Gantz, the former army chief who, according to polls, could replace Netanyahu in an early election, voted in favor of the order to invade Rafah to.
Gantz claimed that Hamas had agreed to terms that “did not correspond to the dialogue that has been conducted so far with the mediators.”
It was a dramatic political about-face for Netanyahu since the weekend, when an agreement on what Israelis said were the original terms appeared imminent, Shtrauchler said. “It looked like a deal was being worked out behind his back. . . and in less than 72 hours he was able to unanimously reject Hamas’s proposal and make a decision to invade Rafah.”
But a diplomat briefed on the hectic negotiations over the weekend said the proposal adopted by Hamas was similar to one previously supported by Israel.
One factor was crucial. As Burns commuted from Cairo to Doha, Hamas had demanded guarantees from the US that the agreement would end in a permanent ceasefire – a longstanding demand that Israel has flatly rejected.
The mediators tried to allay Hamas’s concerns by reiterating that the reference to the goal of “sustainable calm” during the second phase of the deal – language that Israel had previously accepted – was an assurance that would set the conditions for should bring an end to the conflict.
The Israeli invasion of Rafah immediately changed the calculus in the besieged enclave, said Mkhaimar Abusada, a professor at Al-Azhar University in Gaza who now lives in exile in Cairo. Given that nearly 35,000 Palestinians have been killed in the seven months of Israel’s offensive in the Gaza Strip and their “homes, schools, hospitals, roads, electricity and water lines have been completely destroyed,” any ceasefire is acceptable to the Palestinians to protect the remains to save, he said.
“Hamas does not have the upper hand. But neither does Netanyahu – now that Hamas has accepted any deal, he is in a big dilemma.”
Some Israelis within the government suspected that Sinwar, Hamas’s leader in Gaza, had encouraged Hamas’s willingness to persevere in a hostage deal and concluded that the war would soon end anyway.
“He doesn’t want to pay the price for something he gets for free. . . He believes the world will make Israel stop,” a person familiar with Israel’s war plans said of Sinwar, one of the masterminds of the Oct. 7 attack on Israel that Israeli officials said killed 1,200 people and killed 240 were taken hostage.
Israel’s invasion of Rafah has drawn strong international condemnation, from the EU to Saudi Arabia. It is also a clear disregard for US President Joe Biden, who has pushed for an end to the war and warned that a Rafah operation endangering Palestinian civilians represents a red line for him.
For Egypt, the issue is seen as a serious threat to national security amid fears that fierce fighting between the IDF and Hamas along the 14km-long Gaza border would lead to an exodus of tens of thousands of desperate Palestinians to the Sinai Peninsula.
“The Egyptians are afraid [and they are] “Angry and exhausted by Israel,” said an Israeli official familiar with the debates between Israeli and Egyptian intelligence officers. “You see a deal that they negotiated and suddenly Israel won’t sign it.”
The fate of the negotiations now depends on small details, according to a diplomat involved in the hectic shuttle diplomacy. The draft proposal broadly envisages the chance that 33 Israeli hostages – including women, children, the elderly and the wounded – will be released in exchange for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners; Allowing Gazans to return to northern Gaza; and an increase in humanitarian aid.
This would be followed, mediators hoped, by an extended ceasefire during which the remaining hostages would be released. The mediators proposed language on “sustainable calm” to break the deadlock over Hamas’ demands for a permanent ceasefire and Israel’s insistence that a deal would not lead to an end to the war.
At least 37 of the 132 hostages held in Gaza may already be dead, Israeli officials believe. Many are wounded; others are older people. If talks to release them prove unsuccessful, Netanyahu would have no choice but to invade all of Rafah, despite the humanitarian cost and diplomatic setback.
“The political reasons are very narrow – if there are any at all,” said Israel Ziv, a retired major general who led the IDF’s Gaza division. “If there is no deal, he will have to go to Rafah. And if he goes to Rafah, he will have to face the consequences.”
Netanyahu’s reluctance to resist decades of international pressure to make even the smallest concessions to the Palestinians has exhausted any confidence his critics had in his motives.
Yair Golan, a retired Israeli general and left-wing politician, said he would support sending Israeli troops to Rafah as a tactical move to increase pressure on Hamas to strike a hostage deal. But he is skeptical.
“The prime minister has undermined previous attempts at negotiations, so this could just be a way to avoid an end to the war and buy time,” Golan said. “The central question is: Does Netanyahu really want a deal or not? My conclusion is that he is not doing this for political reasons.”
Satellite visualization by Jana Tauschinski