The Best of Bad Options for Recovering the Hostages
This terrible crisis leaves no good choices—but the U.S. may have more ways to pressure Hamas than Israel does.
A truism of national security is that leaders constantly face a dilemma in which neither choice is good. In wartime especially, that choice can be excruciating. Today, Israel’s leaders confront just such a challenge: hostages.
Hamas has imposed a war on Israel, one set in motion by the gruesome atrocities committed by the Gaza-based Islamist group. In the October 7 attack, Hamas terrorists murdered more than 1,300 Israelis in their homes, at their workplaces, and at a music festival, riddling babies with bullets and mutilating the bodies of others; they took scores of survivors back to Gaza as hostages.
Amid the horror and carnage, those hostages must not be overlooked or forgotten. Israel’s ethos has always been shaped by a sense that its enemies—seeking the Jewish state’s destruction—must understand that for any cost they might impose, they will pay 50-fold. But another part of that ethos insists that no Israeli is abandoned.
That instinctive mindset has in the past produced a number of prisoner swaps, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision in 2011 to trade more than 1,000 jailed Palestinians—many with Israeli blood on their hands—for a single soldier, Gilad Shalit. Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas in Gaza now and one of the masterminds of this month’s attack, and Ali Qadhi, who led the strike and has since been killed by the Israel Defense Forces, were both released in that 2011 trade. The swap was popular in Israel at the time, but these consequences will make Netanyahu and his war cabinet far less willing to contemplate further such trades.
That background is a reminder that Israel’s room for maneuver on the hostages is very limited. That context may make the Biden administration’s options, though not great, all the more crucial.
As many as 199 hostages were seized in the Hamas onslaught and have been taken back to Gaza. Yet Israel must now wage war, even as it hopes for the hostages’ release. Compounding this conundrum is the fact that the hostages include not only Israelis but also Americans and people from several other countries. How can Israel balance its military aims with the need to recover the hostages?
There is, regrettably, no simple answer. Hamas seized the hostages knowing full well Israel’s history of making trades. On the one hand, the terrorist leaders no doubt hoped the hostages would be a deterrent against Israel’s launching of an all-out war against them. On the other hand, Sinwar and his Hamas allies knew that if they could trade their hostages for a number of militants held in Israeli prisons, they would be heroes among Palestinians who see those held in the Israeli jails as part of the struggle against occupation. Indeed, the spectacle of Hamas gaining the release of prisoners in spite of its killing spree of Israelis would allow its leaders to claim that their way worked. That perception would enable them to promote the idea that, in time, the Hamas-led “resistance” would deliver Israel’s disappearance.
And make no mistake, that is the group’s strategic purpose here. Hamas is not about ending the occupation; it is about ending Israel.
Given this implacable enemy, Israelis don’t just feel the need to make Hamas pay for the invasion and slaughter; whether they are on the left or the right, Israelis believe that the October 7 attack means Hamas has to be neutralized or eradicated in Gaza. They understand that Hamas must be seen to lose decisively: Only an emphatic defeat can ensure that Hamas’s ideology of murderous rejectionism does not become the wave of the future in the region.
All Israelis surely feel the anguish of the families of those held in Gaza, and the desire for the release and recovery of the hostages is a very understandable emotional impulse. But it cannot be at the price of giving Hamas a great victory.
As difficult as rescue efforts may be in a densely populated urban area, with hostages dispersed in tunnels and multiple locations, they are for Israel’s leaders a far better prospect than negotiations for a trade. And who would Israel’s interlocutors in any bargain even be at this moment? Don’t expect Israel to rely on Qatar to mediate—not when Qatar is providing haven for Hamas leaders such as Ismail Haniyeh, giving them a platform to issue press releases defending the indefensible.
Don’t expect any invitation to Turkey to act as a broker either: Ankara may not be as obvious in its support for Hamas as Doha, but Israel would reasonably be wary of any offer from President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to mediate, for he, too, has a vested interest in Hamas achieving something. (Erdoğan’s links to the Muslim Brotherhood have always made him sympathetic to Hamas.)
Because Israel trusts neither Qatar nor Turkey, and believes that it has limited ability to influence them, it will look to the Biden administration to employ the U.S.’s leverage and pursue various diplomatic avenues on Israel’s behalf. During his visit to Doha, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken will surely have pressed the Qataris to use their relationship with Hamas to obtain the release of the hostages.
Qatar or Turkey may, on their own initiative, be trying to persuade Hamas to take this step. Both countries have an incentive to demonstrate the value of their ties to Hamas, a self-interest that would be served by encouraging Hamas to use this means to improve its own international image. (Far better morally, of course, if both states threaten to break all ties with Hamas should its leaders fail to release all hostages in a timely manner, but that possibility seems remote, given these governments’ Islamist affiliations.)
One avenue the Biden administration could explore through the Qataris or Turks—or, preferably, the Egyptians, who have no interest in strengthening Hamas—would be a release of women and children in return for an agreement from Israel to permit some deliveries of humanitarian assistance to Gaza. Hamas might agree to this, to improve its international standing, even as it will surely seek to exploit such a deal by infiltrating its fighters into southern Gaza. That is a risk, but Israel, too, has reasons to manage its image—to show that it is fighting Hamas but not punishing the Palestinian people.
A more ominous probability is that Hamas will renew its threats to begin executing hostages, either in response to Israel’s expected ground incursion or as a way to get the U.S. to pressure Israel, especially if American lives seem foremost among those at risk. No doubt the Biden administration is already consulting with the Israelis on their approach to the hostages.
In general, President Joe Biden has signaled that there will be no daylight between the U.S. and Israel on this matter. According to a report I have heard, the U.S. has already deployed a hostage-rescue unit to Israel to assist with possible coordination. This suggests that both shared intelligence and possibly joint efforts to conduct rescue operations may follow—especially if Hamas carries out its dire threats to start executing hostages. Typically, rescue operations are attempted only as a last resort. The necessary intelligence gathering takes time, and such operations carry an intrinsically high risk: As likely as they are to succeed and save some hostages, they can also result in the death of others.
This terrible crisis has no straightforward, immediate solution. For now, the best way the White House can help Israel is to continue to call for the hostages’ unconditional release. It should emphasize the terrible damage inflicted on the Palestinian cause by Hamas’s illegitimate attempt to gain leverage through innocent victims. Above all, the U.S. can lean with all its might on those who have some influence with Hamas—and let them know what they have to lose by their association with a cult of death, not life.