Benjamin Netanyahu is under renewed pressure to prioritise Israel’s hostages in Gaza, with some of his war cabinet, opposition leaders and large parts of public opinion swinging behind calls to stop military operations to enable their release.
While Israel’s premier has faced weeks of protests from relatives of the 136 remaining hostages, support for halting the offensive against Hamas to allow negotiations has significantly increased in recent days across Israeli politics.
With public polls even last month showing that more than 57 per cent of Israelis place the hostages’ return as more important than toppling Hamas in Gaza, Netanyahu this weekend faced dissent from within his war cabinet, according to one person familiar with discussions.
The dilemma for his government ramped up late on Monday after the Palestinian militant group Hamas released a video showing three Israeli hostages appealing to Netanyahu personally.
“Stop this madness and bring us home to our families while we’re still alive,” Noa Argamani, one hostage, said in the video, which also featured pleas from the two other captives before gruesome images at the end of the film purportedly showing their dead bodies.
Hamas alleged that the two men were killed by Israeli military fire, a claim the Israel Defense Forces rejected, calling the video part of the group’s “psychological warfare” against the hostages and their families.
Netanyahu and his security chiefs have insisted, as they have from the start of the war, that only sustained military pressure and the continuation of the conflict can secure the hostages’ return.
“If the war ends now, the fate of the hostages will be sealed for many years — in Hamas captivity,” Yoav Gallant, Israel’s defence minister, said on Monday. “Only from a position of strength can we ensure the release of hostages.”
Despite continued public support for the campaign’s original twin objectives of both “dismantling” Hamas and rescuing the hostages, cracks have appeared inside the cross-party Israeli war cabinet formed to prosecute the campaign.
Gadi Eisenkot, a centrist politician and former military chief, demanded that the government begin “thinking outside the box” and show “courage” in pursuing a broader deal with Hamas to release hostages, according to Israeli media reports.
Eisenkot joined the Netanyahu coalition with his party leader Benny Gantz in October. It remains unclear whether Eisenkot and Gantz, who are seen as less hardline than Netanyahu, would go as far as supporting a sustained ceasefire to enable such a hostage release.
Relatives of the remaining hostages staged a 24-hour rally in Tel Aviv over the weekend to mark 100 days since they were taken in Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel.
Hagar Brodutch, one of more than 100 hostages released as part of a temporary ceasefire in late November, told the rally of her real fears for the fate of those still in captivity.
“136 coffins are not a picture of victory. The security cabinet must make freeing the hostages its top priority and agree to any deal that will bring them home. They have no more time left,” she told the crowd of tens of thousands.
This sentiment is echoed by a growing number of politicians. Yair Lapid, head of Israel’s largest opposition group, Yesh Atid, told the same rally that the freedom of hostages was a more urgent goal than toppling Hamas in Gaza.
“Yahya Sinwar — we’ll kill sooner or later,” he said of the Hamas leader who planned the October 7 attack. “The hostages need to be returned home now.”
Qatar, along with the US and Egypt, has been attempting to negotiate a new “multiphase” deal between Israel and Hamas that would include an extended truce, the release of all the hostages and increased humanitarian aid to devastated Gaza. The aim would be to also use the truce to secure a permanent ceasefire, according to a person familiar with the talks.
Such an agreement, rightwing Israeli ministers have said, would effectively allow Hamas to survive and emerge from the war victorious — a move the ministers reject out of hand.
Both Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, two far-right politicians in Netanyahu’s governing coalition, have in recent weeks threatened to topple the government if the offensive against Hamas is stopped.
Netanyahu, whose popularity is falling in the polls, has been loath to break with his far-right political allies in order to ensure his political survival. But in a weekend press conference, the prime minister touted broader national security “considerations” for the lack of progress.
“Just like we can’t put ourselves in their place . . . they [the hostage families] with all the sorrow, pain, grief and suffering, can’t put themselves in the place of the political echelon that needs to make these difficult decisions,” Netanyahu said.
Hamas militants killed at least 1,200 people, and took 240 captives during the October 7 attack on southern Israel that sparked the war, according to Israeli figures. More than 24,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s retaliatory air and ground offensive in the Gaza Strip, according to health authorities in the Hamas-ruled territory.