Meanwhile on the International front....

If you bothered to read past the headline it was for "some" hostages (women, children, elderly). And clearly Hamas thought it would benefit tactically from a ceasefire (opportunity to regroup and re-arm) given their stated goals and their stated willingness to use as many "martyrs" (human shields) as it takes to accomplish these goals and to stage as many more October 7s as possible. I must say you're doing some fine work in this thread.

 

The sources said the Israeli prime minister rejected the deal outright in negotiations soon after Hamas militants staged an unprecedented incursion into Israeli territory on 7 October, killing an estimated 1,400 people.

Negotiations resumed after the launch of the Israeli ground offensive on 27 October, but the same sources said Netanyahu had continued to take a tough line on proposals involving ceasefires of different durations in exchange for a varying number of hostages.

Others indicated that negotiations which took place prior to the ground invasion involved a far larger number of hostages, with Hamas proposing the release of dozens of foreign nationals captive in Gaza.


The Guardian isn't alone in reporting this.

But it sounds as if sources inside his own government are leaking these stories to pressure Netanyahu into a ceasefire-for-hostage exchange. Or at least to hurt him politically.

Thousands across Israel rally for release of hostages held by Hamas in Gaza

Netanyahu has been very consistent from the beginning in saying no.

 

I do not ask this snarkily. Is there any reporting Hamas would give up all hostages, not just foreign nationals, the old, and the young? If not, there really isn't a point to it in a large scale sense. It matters to the individuals, but if Hamas keeps some hostages, they are still playing the same game.

 

Hard to know if the "all-for-all" approach is under discussion anywhere.

www.npr.org/2023/11/07/1210775385/israel-hamas-gaza-hostages-prisoner-exchange

 

If we agree off the bat that any hostage dying is bad, can we also agree that 100 hostages dying is worse than 10 dying?

 

Obviously fewer deaths are better. But what does Hamas show if they give up the sympathetic hostages who are citizens of countries you don't want to piss off and still hold people to threaten Israel with their deaths?

It's a matter of degree. Hamas will continue to hold people hostage as a warfare tactic.

 

Worth remembering that as recently as 2011 Israel traded more than 100o prisoners for one soldier, Gilad Shalit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilad_Shalit_prisoner_exchange

One of those freed prisoners, Yahya Sinwar, is thought to be the architect of the October 7 attack.

Who is Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, dubbed ‘a dead man walking’ by Israel?

 

And one wonders why Netanyahu has been less than enthusiastic about a cease-fire.

 

He made that last deal, too.

His release was widely celebrated across Israel; in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, so too was the agreed exchange of 1,027 Palestinians held in Israeli jails. Foremost among them was Yahya Sinwar, who returned home to Gaza, eventually becoming Hamas’s most important leader in the territory. Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, then in his second term, did face some criticism for the starkly asymmetric deal. The daily Jerusalem Post said at the time that “any such exchange, however humane to Shalit and his family, would imperil thousands of other Israelis”.

Whatever happens next, Gaza is what Netanyahu will be remembered for | Bethan McKernan

Twelve years later, after Hamas murdered 1,400 people on 7 October, there are not one or two Israelis captive in Gaza, but 220 – among them children, the elderly, and dual and foreign nationals. Netanyahu must now decide what price Israel is willing to pay for their safe return, if it is even possible while waging a war against Hamas that has killed more than 7,000 Palestinians.

Netanyahu is facing the same public pressure as he did with Shalit, but on a previously unimaginable scale. This disaster unfolded on his watch, and no matter what he does now, it is unlikely that the majority of Israelis will judge their already divisive and scandal-plagued leader kindly.

Again worth asking: how does Israel better / more effectively defend itself?

 

Fool me once, shame on you, yada, yada ...

 

I will note that the reporting in the originally-posted Guardian article uses vague terms like "a tough line" and "a varying number." That "varying number" could be 1, 5, 10, 50, 150 -- we don't know. And "continued to take a tough line" provides no meaningful time frame and no sense of Netanyahu's counter-demands. And how long did he "continue" to do this after Oct. 27 ground operations began? A day? A week? the last 2-3 weeks? And while the article references Hamas allegedly offering up "women, children and elderly," it does not reference ALL women, children and elderly. Did they offer to release a couple of each? One of each? All of each? Not clear. The Guardian is drawing quite a snarky, arch conclusion as to the reasonableness of Netanyahu's position couched in an awful lot of vagaries. As to be expected from a well-written but basically, Corbynite publication like the Guardian.

I am not a Netanyahu supporter. I am center-left on the Israeli political spectrum and firmly in favor of a two-state solution and i have detested him for years for putting Israel's security at risk in order to court the religious right and stay in power and for turning support for America's most faithful ally into a Republican wedge issue. I also have a personal interest in the release of the hostages -- as I mentioned once in the other thread, a friend of my son's (if he's even alive) is being held hostage in Gaza (he's American-Israeli, his family emigrated to Israel when he was a little kid and his parents -- who I don't know personally but know a number of people who do -- have done a number of TV interviews and his mother spoke at the UN and their courage and poise through this nightmare has been awe-inspiring). And I have personally been frustrated with lack of movement on the hostage front and have had a lot of unease about what might happen to the hostages in a ground campaign with an unclear endgame. But the Guardian's headline and the conclusion it leads people to draw is, in two words, fucking bullshit. Not to mention that the fact that Hamas -- given its stated goals -- is willing to release anyone in exchange for a cease fire suggests very insidious reasons for wanting one -- regrouping and rearming. Which is why Netanyahu is justified in making very high demands in exchange for a cease fire. After all, let's not forget there was a cease fire in place in the pre-dawn hours of October 7. I am so sick of people in the West holding Israel to a standard that they don't hold themselves to while happily being suckered about the very nature of Hamas in service of some sort of intersectional leftist horseshit. No other nation is expected to root out a terrorist threat right next door, much less across the ocean, with tweezers. For fuck sake, the next time I hear some clown say "Israel has the right to defend itself, but..." without providing any practical, realistic explanation of what that actually means, I'm going to lose my shit, even despite my own concerns about the longterm strategic vision there. Just look at the pictures from Mosul (which a bunch of dishonest fucks repeatedly post as images from Gaza). Is that an example of U.S. warplanes "defending America?" Did the U.S. have a stronger security interest in helping the Iraqi government destroy ISIS than Israel does in destroying Hamas? And was that operation completed with no civilian casualties? Or a one-for-one ISIS terror victim/Mosul civilian casualty ratio? So many with zero underlying knowledge of the history or nature of the conflict -- and what they do get is from Tik Tok, from DSA propaganda 0r maybe from reflexively anti-Israel mainline liberal Protestant denomination pastors -- making smug statements. Useful idiots indeed. Rant over.