Hamas has tried for the last eighteen months to split the US and Israel. Will the release of the last living American hostage spell success for the terrorists? Or will it turn out to be a desperate gamble that gives away their last measure of leverage with Donald Trump?
We may soon see, assuming this actually transpires at all:
Hamas said Friday that it had agreed to release Israeli-American hostage Edan Alexander, the last living U.S. citizen held in Gaza, as well as the bodies of four more deceased dual-national captives.
Nothing has been finalized, Hazem Qassem, a Hamas spokesman told NBC News. But he said that the militant group had agreed to a proposal put forward by mediators and was awaiting the results of further negotiations.
The decision to free Alexander was first announced in a statement posted to Telegram on Friday. It said that Hamas is ready to begin negotiations to start the second phase of its ceasefire deal with Israel.
“Nothing has been finalized” usually precedes another instance of the Hamas Hokey Pokey. Hamas offers a concession, gets an agreement on the basis of that concession, then balks and demands more concessions without offering any of their own. That has not just been the pattern of the negotiations around this war, but in every single conflict that Hamas has started with Israel. And it usually works, because American administrations value quiet more than they value peace.
The Israelis are furious over the new twist, especially since it appears to be a weak counter-offer to Witkoff’s latest proposed sweetener for further negotiations:
US Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff presented an updated American proposal in Doha on Wednesday. A source involved in the negotiations told the Post that the proposal discussed by Witkoff included the release of five living hostages and several deceased hostages in exchange for extending the ceasefire in Gaza for a few weeks.
In other words, Hamas’s current proposal is quite different from the American mediator’s proposal, the source added. The Prime Minister’s Office said in a statement on Friday that Hamas “continues to enact manipulations and psychological terror” as it “refuses to budge a millimeter” from its original demands.
An Israeli official told The Post that Hamas’s intention to release only hostages with American citizenships is “a manipulation intended to sabotage the negotiations…Hamas has not changed its position, despite American efforts, and despite our efforts to make concessions.”
Benjamin Netanyahu sees this as an extension of the Hamas Hokey Pokey. His office blasted the new Hamas proposal as “psychological warfare”:
“While Israel has accepted the Witkoff proposal,” says the Prime Minister’s Office, “Hamas remains firm in its refusal and has not budged one millimeter.”
The PMO accuses Hamas of engaging in “manipulation and psychological warfare.”
The Witkoff outline, which Israel says was proposed by US special envoy Steve Witkoff, would see half of the hostages released immediately, a ceasefire through the end of Passover, and a possible release of all the other hostages if an agreement is reached on ending the war.
In other words, Hamas has made a bold attempt to buy off the Americans. Perhaps they have taken Donald Trump’s warnings about “hell to pay” more seriously than previously thought. It seems more likely that they are trying to force Trump into cutting Israel loose — or at least forcing Israel to back down — by making him choose between the US ally and an American citizen.
This is why negotiating for hostages is a bad idea altogether. It may seem humane, but it only enables more terrorism and incentivizes more hostage-taking. It forces nations to bow to malicious non-state actors and contradict their own national interests through psychological torture, or at least through the fear of the public-relations consequences of refusing to play this game with terrorists. The West puts itself in this position constantly, which is in large part why we keep finding ourselves in that position at all.
Will Trump resist the manipulation of Hamas in this instance? Or is the potential of declaring a very short-term victory in Alexander’s release too tempting to avoid throwing the Israelis under the bus?
