DANIELLE PLETKA
The Hostages
What’s now clear to the world is that one reason it has been so difficult to find and rescue hostages is that they are living with “regular” Gazans, serving as slaves in their homes, suffering regular beatings, malnutrition, and psychological and physical torture at the hands of individuals not known to be members of Hamas.
Some have integrated this information with polls showing widespread support among Gazans for October 7th, to suggest that Gaza is irretrievably lost — that Gaza is Hamas. Haviv points out that it’s more complex than that: Gazans love and hate Hamas; they suffer at Hamas’s hands, yet appreciate their effectiveness against the Israeli enemy. What that suggests is that fatally disabling Hamas and replacing it with a technocratic government is critical. Who staffs that government? Excellent question, with no viable answers as yet. I wrote about this back in November, and not much has changed.
In the wake of the hostage rescue, Hamas put out the order that if Israeli troops are advancing, hostages are to be killed. Is this a death sentence for the remaining living hostages? Not necessarily. What’s evident is that the hostage rescue relied at least in part on human intelligence from Palestinians. Imagine there are hostages living next door; if you rat out their “hosts,” the odds of your being killed in the coming Israeli onslaught are lower. In other words, all is not lost.
The War
Israeli authorities have suggested the war with Hamas will continue until 2025. Meanwhile, the Biden administration has done its utmost to stymie the Israeli war effort, leaning so hard on the Jerusalem government that the assault on Rafah was, for all intents and purposes, paused for three months; alternately threatening and praising the Israeli government, but since early 2024, consistently providing Hamas with a reason to believe it can prevail if it hangs on long enough.
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