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The secret negotiations that led to the Gaza hostages deal
Shortly after Hamas militants took hostages during their deadly assault on southern Israel on October 7, the government of Qatar contacted the White House with a request: Form a small team of advisers to help work to get the captives freed.
That work, begun in the days after the hostages were taken, finally bore fruit with the announcement of a prisoner swap deal mediated by Qatar and Egypt and agreed by Israel, Hamas and the United States.
The secretive effort included tense personal diplomatic engagement by US President Joe Biden, who held a number of urgent conversations with the emir of Qatar and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the weeks leading up to the deal.
It also involved hours of painstaking negotiations including Secretary of State Antony Blinken, CIA Director Bill Burns, national security adviser Jake Sullivan and his deputy Jon Finer, and US Middle East envoy Brett McGurk, among others.Two officials involved in the effort provided extensive details of the work that led to an agreement in which 50 hostages are to be freed in exchange for 150 Palestinian prisoners during a four-day pause in fighting.
Qatar’s helped broker initial release
Shortly after October 7, Qatar – a long-established mediator in a volatile region – approached the White House with sensitive information regarding the hostages and the potential for their release, the officials said. The Qataris asked that a small team, which they called a “cell,” be established to work the issue privately with the Israelis.
Sullivan directed McGurk and another National Security Council official, Josh Geltzer, to establish the team. This was done without telling other relevant US agencies because Qatar and Israel demanded extreme secrecy with only a few people to be in the know, the officials said.
McGurk, a seasoned diplomat with deep experience in the Middle East, held daily morning calls with the prime minister of Qatar, Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani. He reported back to Sullivan and Biden was briefed daily on the process.
Biden got an upfront look at what the victims of the Hamas attack endured when he held an emotional, lengthy meeting on October 13 with the families of Americans who were either being held hostage or were unaccounted for.
Days later, Biden traveled to Tel Aviv for October 18 talks with Netanyahu. The official said securing the release of hostages was a central focus of his discussions with Netanyahu and his war cabinet, as well as humanitarian assistance.
Five days later, on October 23, the White House team’s work helped yield the release of two American hostages, Natalie and Judith Raanan.
From outside Sullivan’s West Wing office McGurk, Sullivan and Finer tracked in real time the captives’ difficult, multi-hour journey out of Gaza.
The return of the two Americans proved it was possible to gain freedom for hostages and gave confidence to Biden that Qatar could deliver through the small team that had been established, the officials said.
Now, an intensified process started to get more hostages out. When this happened, Burns began speaking regularly with Mossad director David Barnea.
Biden saw an opportunity to gain the release of a large number of hostages and that a deal for prisoners was the only realistic path to securing a pause in the fighting, the officials said.
Deal nearly reached prior to ground invasion
On October 24, with Israel poised to launch a ground offensive in Gaza, the US side got word that Hamas had agreed to the parameters of a deal to release women and children, which would mean a pause and a delay in the ground invasion.
US officials debated with the Israelis whether or not the ground offensive should be delayed.
The Israelis argued that terms were not firm enough to delay, since there was no proof of life for the hostages. Hamas claimed they could not determine who was being held until a pause in fighting began.
Americans and Israelis viewed the Hamas position as disingenuous. The official said Israel’s invasion plan was adapted to support a pause if a deal came together.
Biden then engaged over the next three weeks in detailed talks as proposals about a potential hostage release were traded back and forth. Demands were made that Hamas produce the lists of hostages it was holding, their identifying information, and guarantees of release.
The process was long and cumbersome – communication was difficult and messages had to be passed from Doha or Cairo into Gaza and back, the officials said.
Biden held a previously undisclosed phone call with the Qatari prime minister when the phasing of releases began to take shape, the official said.
Under the agreement that was taking shape, women and children hostages would be freed in a first phase, together with a commensurate release of Palestinian prisoners from the Israelis.
The Israelis insisted Hamas ensure all women and children come out in this phase. The US side agreed, and demanded through Qatar proof of life or identifying information for women and children held by Hamas.
Hamas said it could guarantee 50 in the first phase, but refused to produce a list of identifying criteria. On November 9, Burns met in Doha with the Qatari leader and the Mossad’s Barnea to go through the texts of the emerging arrangement.
The key obstacle at that point was that Hamas had not clearly identified who it was holding.
Three days later, Biden called the emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, and demanded to know the names or clear identifying information for the 50 hostages including ages, gender and nationalities. Without the information, the official said, there was no basis to move forward.
Shortly after Biden’s call, Hamas produced details for the 50 hostages it said would be released in the first phase of any deal.
Biden in a November 14 call urged Netanyahu to take the deal – Netanyahu agreed.
McGurk saw Netanyahu that same day in Israel. Walking out of a meeting, Netanyahu grabbed McGurk’s arm and said “we need this deal” and urged Biden call the emir of Qatar on the final terms, one of the officials said.
“Time was up”
Talks stalled as communications went dark in Gaza.
When they resumed, Biden was in San Francisco attending an Asia-Pacific summit. He called the emir of Qatar and told him this was the last chance, and the emir pledged to apply pressure to close the deal, the officials said.
“The president insisted the deal had to close, now. Time was up,” one official said.
On November 18, McGurk met in Doha with the Qatari prime minister. Burns was dialed in after he spoke with Mossad. The meeting identified the last remaining gaps toward a deal.
The agreement was now structured for women and children to be freed in the first phase, but with an expectation for future releases and the aim to bring all hostages home to their families.
In Cairo the next morning, McGurk met with Egypt intelligence chief Abbas Kamil. Word came from Hamas leaders in Gaza that they had accepted nearly all the agreements worked out the day before in Doha.
Only one issue remained, tied to the number of hostages to be released in the first phase and the ultimate structure of the deal to incentivize releases beyond the 50 known women and children, the officials said.
A flurry of additional contacts ensued, and the deal finally came together.
Right now is the closest Israel has been to a full war with Hezbollah since October 7.
This is true even in comparison to the period between July 30 and August 25, probably the second most dangerous period between the sides.
How do we know that the coming days, weeks, and months or two before the coming winter are so potentially explosive?
It is not just the statement that Defense Minister Yoav Gallant issued on Monday about his talk with US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin in which he said that the possibility for a diplomatic solution with Hezbollah in the North is running out.It is not just the rumors that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu intends to replace Gallant with Gideon Saar as defense minister in order to have greater support for a major operation against Hezbollah.
It is not even just that Netanyahu’s main political opposition, Benny Gantz, continues to pound the prime minister as being too scared to risk a major battle in the North, which has left the 60,000 evacuated northern residents abandoned for nearly a year.
Confidence for major Hezbollah operation
These are the open and obvious signs – and frankly, much of Israel’s political and military class has been threatening to send Hezbollah back to the Stone Age since late early spring 2024.
It is also that the Jerusalem Post has received indications behind the scenes at both the political and military levels from sources who before were pouring cold water on the public statements, who are now signaling that the public statements are serious.
The reasons they give show how realities have changed a lot throughout the war.
For most of the war, the main reason not to get into a big fight with Hezbollah was to avoid distractions that might handicap the IDf from taking apart all 24 of Hamas’s battalions in Gaza.
As of August 21, Gallant declared Hamas’s last battalion in Rafah defeated.
Despite Netanyahu’s publicly threatening words and tone, another major reason that a big war with Hezbollah was not likely going to really happen until now was that the prime minister was privately terrified of how many Israelis might die from the expected Hezbollah onslaught of 6,000-8,000 rockets per day in the event of such a war.
That seems to have changed as of August 25.
On August 25, Hezbollah planned to launch several hundred and maybe up to 1,000 rockets on Israel, including on critical Israeli intelligence headquarters bases just North of Tel Aviv.
Netanyahu and the war cabinet instructed the IDF not to launch a full preemptive war on Hezbollah because, among other reasons, he was still worried about the impact on the Israeli home front.
However, something changed radically as a result of the events of August 25.
Since October 7, Netanyahu has doubted the IDF in areas where the objective risk was higher, even if the military supposedly would have the upper hand.
Sources have indicated that behind closed doors he was initially hesitant for each of the three invasions of Gaza; northern Gaza in late October, Khan Yunis in December, and Rafah in May.
Yet on August 25, the IDF did not just beat Hezbollah – it cleaned house.
Despite IDF’s substantive victories over Hamas and small tactical victories against Hezbollah, this was the first time that the IDF won a major and complex strategic victory over Hezbollah during this war.
It blew up the vast majority of the rockets and drones Hezbollah intended to attack Israel with before these threats could even be launched.
Hezbollah neither killed nor damaged anyone or anything of significance, while the IDF destroyed thousands of Hezbollah rockets.
Suddenly, Netanyahu has a newfound confidence that he can afford a major operation against Hezbollah with much fewer losses to the home front than he had expected.
What if – instead of 5,000 to 10,000 dead Israelis from tens of thousands of Hezbollah rockets over several weeks – he could hit Hezbollah harder than it’s ever been hit before – and destroy so many of its rocket launchers on the ground, that Israeli casualties might be not just smaller, but exponentially smaller?
Another factor was until now there was a good chance that Hamas would agree to a ceasefire and that such a deal would lead Hezbollah to unilaterally stop attacking Israel, just as it did during the November 23-30 ceasefire with Hamas.
While this is not impossible, the chances of a ceasefire with Hamas now are lower than they have been in several months after both sides have dug in on various issues after having seemed to have navigated around 90% of the obstacles.
All along, the only other option that has been discussed if diplomacy failed was a major Israeli operation.
And Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah is still furious about the killing of his military chief Fuad Shukr by the IDF on July 30, so no one views him as being more flexible now than in other periods.
Finally, the winter comes into play.
Sources have told the Post that if more than 4-6 weeks pass without an operation, it may be impossible or much harder to carry out such an operation until Spring 2025.
That would mean condemning the northern residents to another 6 months outside of their homes, something becoming increasingly untenable domestically in Israel.
Pressed that the IDF managed a successful invasion of Khan Yunis and the finishing off of Hamas in Shejaia in northern Gaza in the middle of winter 2023-2024, sources responded that the winter in mountainous Lebanon is far more fierce and difficult to manage than in the deserts of Gaza.
None of this means that a new broader war with Hezbollah is certain.
It would still be a massively risky proposition for Israel, Hezbollah, and also for the sides’ sponsors: the US as well as Iran.
The US could be drawn into a regional war or at least be seen as having failed to prevent a larger war after a year of diplomacy, something that could impact the current US presidential election.
Iran could lose Hezbollah as its major potential threat to hold over Israel should the Jewish state dare to think of attacking the Islamic Republic’s nuclear facilities. Hezbollah would undoubtedly remain the main player in Lebanon but might lose many of its most feared capabilities.
But this is clearly the riskiest moment in the North since October 7.
Time might have been on Israel’s side for significant portions of the current war, but it no longer is and likely has not been since April-May.
Yemen’s ballistic missile attack on Israel on Sunday made this clearer than ever.
Too much of the conversation about how long the war should go revolves around whether more military pressure can crack Hamas and get the Israeli hostages back versus whether a deal must be cut now, even if Hamas remains in power, so as to get the hostages back as time runs out for them.
Too little of the conversation takes into account how much more vulnerable Israel is becoming to attack on new fronts. Regarding these new fronts, Israel might never have taken direct hits or might have avoided taking direct hits for years or decades more if not for the length of this war, gradually exposing additional asymmetric holes in Israel’s military power.In order of current severity, Israel is facing seven fronts of attack: Lebanon, Iran, Yemen, the West Bank, Gaza, Syria, and Iraq.
That’s right: Gaza is now probably only the fifth most dangerous front militarily, even though Israel is still treating it as the most important in terms of military resources (and diplomatically, it may be the most important front.)
Originally, when longer meant from October until January, part of the purpose of being willing to drag out the war longer was to take the necessary time to defeat Hamas in different pockets of Gaza while leaving time to move the Palestinian civilian population from place to place in between invasions.
Another part was to use the mix of ongoing pressure and threats of continued impending military invasions and pressure to wear Hamas down into cutting a deal to return the Israeli hostages.
A third part was that a slower war using strategic air strikes, tanks, and artillery as a prelude to infantry invasions of various areas meant fewer infantry casualties.
The theory was that Israel’s air defense was strong enough to withstand whatever Hamas could fire on the home front up until the point that the IDF destroyed most of Hamas’s rocket firing capability around December-January.
But all of this was assuming the war with Hamas would end around January – the official estimate of all defense officials in October-November – and that the other fronts would stay relatively quiet.
But as the war drew on, Hezbollah started firing on a larger number of northern towns and cities; Yemen joined the war, at first only against Eilat, but eventually also striking Tel Aviv, and now aiming again for central Israel.
Iran started pushing much harder to threaten Israel from the West Bank, Syria, and Iraq, as well as encouraging its proxies in Lebanon and Yemen to take more risks against Israel.
Israel’s increasing tolerance for terrorism
Prior to the war, Israel had come to terms with a horrible, nearly 20-year-long conceit that it would be “ok” with low-level rocket and other attacks on its Gaza corridor villages as long as this did not touch the rest of the country.
From March 2022 until October 7, 2023, most of Israel came to terms with it being “ok” for significant waves of terror against Jews in the West Bank as long as not too much of it crossed the Green Line.
Starting on October 8, 2023, Israel decided it was “ok” for 60,000 northern residents to be evacuated from their homes and for whole towns and cities to be ghost towns, not just for a few weeks, but for nearly a year and counting with no deadline in sight.
Then, it was “ok” for Eilat to be attacked from time to time by the Houthis as long as the missiles were shot down outside of Israeli airspace.
On April 13-14, it became “ok” for Iran to launch over 300 aerial threats at Israel as long as a remarkable number of the threats were shot down, people were not killed, and Israel got to “deter” Tehran in a retaliatory strike against its S-300 anti-aircraft missile system on April 19.
It was “ok” that Israel got into a huge fight about a partial arms freeze with the US in May and that the International Criminal Court and International Court of Justice, which had warned Israel but stayed on the sidelines from October to May, went more all out after the Jewish state in May.
It was “ok” that Hezbollah in August wanted to target 11 IDF bases and northern Tel Aviv key intelligence headquarters as long as the military preemptively struck hard enough on August 25 that Hezbollah’s main goals were thwarted.
The truth is that many of Israel’s nuanced approaches would have worked if the war had ended a long time ago or shortly after the nuanced retaliation.
And there were critics of Israel bashing it from November onward.
But when time continues to drag on, Israel’s enemies on many fronts have more time to dissect the way the IDF operates and when and where it lets its guard down more, and then get lots of chances to test the many potential holes. When time drags on, Israel’s legitimacy problems move from critics to its top allies like the US, UK, and France and metastasize with the international courts from a minor problem to a major crisis.
On Thursday of last week, I was in Rafah in Gaza. There were no Palestinians to be seen. No battles. No gunfire. I had my helmet and flak jacket, and they moved us around in a Namer armored vehicle. I felt as safe as could be. Of course, there are still thousands of Hamas terrorists in Gaza, and if anyone ignores them as we did on October 7, there could be another disaster in Israel’s future.
But right now, they can barely pose a threat to IDF forces a block away from them – and that only if the forces are not in Namers and lack air and tank support – let alone to anyone outside of Gaza.
This morning, waking up at 6:21 a.m. in Modiin to rocket sirens after months of quiet, not knowing whether Hezbollah or Iran was firing missiles at us, only to then learn that it was the Houthis, I felt far less safe than I had in Gaza.
When I traveled to Paatei Modiin Train Station Platform 4 this morning and saw the impact of shrapnel on an escalator I have walked on a thousand times, it was clear how many people could have been killed if the Houthis had fired an hour or two later than 6:21 a.m. This is without even getting to the mass mayhem and death that even one ballistic missile getting through to a populated area could cause.
How the war should end, and whether it should be with a quick ceasefire to get back the hostages or with a relatively quick but intense major invasion of Lebanon, synchronized with major strikes on other parties threatening Israel, is an important debate.
Yet, whichever direction is chosen, Israel should pick a direction and act to wrap things up rapidly and decisively.
And anyone who thinks that the war can just continue with no price on these other fronts beyond Gaza until after the US elections in November is kidding themselves and ignoring the writing on the wall on a grossly negligent and serial basis.
The IDF must occupy southern Lebanon to establish a “security corridor” against Hezbollah, Likud MK Ariel Kallner demanded in an interview with Maariv on Sunday.
The coalition lawmaker called on the government, led by his faction leader Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to address tensions along the northern border by conquering Lebanese lands, from the border to as far north as the Litani River.
“Our reality can no longer continue as is,” Kellner told Maariv. “The sole, unavoidable conclusion is that the current border in the North is unsustainable.”
Kellner further claimed that today’s border between Israel and Lebanon is curbing the government’s ability to “provide security for residents of northern Israel.”Kellner: Life along Israel’s northern border can no longer be supported
When asked about the steps Israel’s military should take to destroy the threat Hezbollah poses on the North, Kellner argued that Israel has only two options: “We either create a ‘security zone’ by controlling the Litani River, or life in northern Israel can no longer be supported.
“That is our equation; there is no other way around it,” he added.
Kellner spoke to Maariv while visiting the North as part of a delegation of lawmakers from the Knesset’s Eretz Yisrael Lobby, which advocates for expanding settlements in the West Bank.
Gallant ‘not the same minister who called to bomb Lebanon’
During his visit, Kellner also attacked Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, calling on him to resign.
As per the Likud lawmaker, Gallant is “no longer the defense minister who spoke on bombing Lebanon back to the Stone Age” and must be replaced.
However, Kellner stressed his support for Netanyahu, arguing that the prime minister “continues to seek out victory” amid international pressure.
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