As a hostage deal was announced on Tuesday, former deputy IDF chief Maj.-Gen. (res.) Uzi Dayan told The Jerusalem Post that more hostages could have been returned alive and faster if Israel had chosen to seize complete civilian control of Gaza from the start, as well as negotiate directly with Hamas.
He said that there was a limited number of choices for handling the situation after the October 7 massacre, ones that did not just relate to “military control” but also to “control of food, water, gas, the health sector, and electricity.”
“We needed both to beat Hamas and to return the hostages. Civilian control would have gotten us closer to the hostages more rapidly,” he said.
Despite being politically aligned with the right-wing throughout his post-IDF years, Dayan’s ideas on the issue outflank traditional right-wing and left-wing views in certain areas.
On the one hand, his idea to take full civilian control of Gaza, not just military control and not just what actually happened (regular military penetrations, but not even full military control), outflanks Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s policy from a right-wing perspective.
Alternatively, his idea to then negotiate directly with the terrorist group Hamas outflanks many on the Left who never suggested such a controversial mechanism for resolving the current conflict.
In terms of chronology, Dayan’s ideas were flexible: He believed that Israel could have started taking civilian control of many Gaza Strip areas on a rolling basis at the start of the war – while signaling an openness from the start to negotiate directly with Hamas for the return of its hostages.
If the terrorist group had been willing to give back more hostages, Israel could then have halted its advance. If Hamas was unwilling to give back more hostages, then Israel could have continued its advance.
According to Dayan, once the Jewish state had taken both military and civilian control over all of Gaza, including dominating the food, water, electricity, health, and gas sectors, Jerusalem would have had much more powerful and constant pressure on Hamas in terms of its viability to govern than it ever had during the current war.
In practice, only some officials started talking about taking away Hamas’s civilian control in January-February, and no one ever arrived at a concrete plan for doing so, let alone having the IDF do this.
Pressed that if Israel took civilian control, this would have incurred untold tens of hundreds of billions of dollars of debt from the Jewish state as well as unprecedented delegitimization worldwide, he responded, “We would have found someone else to pay.”
“Some said we should have stopped them from receiving food – no! We should have controlled these things since people saw us as responsible anyway,” Dayan continued.
“At least if we managed these issues, we would have dismantled Hamas’s mechanisms of control.”
He said that the government and the IDF decided instead to “kill Hamas’s leadership and many of its terrorists, and destroy their organization – but then get out of the area,” which, each time the army left an area, allowed Hamas to immediately return its civilian control, especially over food.
Dayan cautioned, “We would not stay there forever. I am against returning Jewish settlements to Gaza. We don’t want to manage the Palestinians in the long run because of the demographics. We need to be a Jewish and democratic state. We need a decisive Jewish majority, which is also what is legal.”
Looking into the future of his scenario or even from the vantage point of the current hostage deal, he said, “Who will take over Gaza in the future from the IDF? Frankly, I don’t know.”
“But we want whoever gets it [to] receive it from us,” Dayan added, with Israel also retaining the ability to influence the next stages of the process.
“They should not receive it from the UNRWA or tribal clans in Gaza, and not from the Palestinian Authority,” he said, rejecting the idea – suggested by the US and by European allies and supported by much of the current Israeli defense establishment – that the PA should govern Gaza along with other parties.
Addressing other ideas for how to have best addressed the goals of defeating Hamas and returning the hostages, Dayan said that he was against former National Security Council chief Giora Eiland’s generals’ plan to evacuate all civilians from northern Gaza and cut that area off from the rest of Gaza.
“Not because of questions about ethics, but because it would not have worked,” he said.
“However, if [the military] controlled all of Gaza,” this could have worked, according to Dayan.
The State of Israel would have then had “all of the leverage,” he continued.
“You would not have needed to even say [out loud] that you would not allow some supplies in because [the other side would understand] that you were in control of these matters,” said the former IDF deputy chief.
Given that Israel’s more limited invasion as is has killed or pressured Hamas to kill several dozen hostages, when questioned about the potential of such a wider invasion, which would put a quicker and a greater crunch on Hamas, endangering the hostages’ lives, Dayan responded, “This could have endangered the hostages, but the alternatives have endangered them more.”
It is already common knowledge, he pointed out, that the best-case scenario would be for around half of the original 250 hostages to return alive.
Supporting his argument for having negotiated directly with Hamas and not through US, Qatari, and Egyptian mediators, he said, “We have no direct negotiations with Hamas. We don’t know exactly where the hostages are. For many, we haven’t gotten signs of life.”
“We say we want all of the hostages back, and we know who is missing, but we don’t know who is alive and who Hamas is specifically holding” vs other Gaza terrorist groups.
“Hamas can also say: ‘I don’t have this person,’ or, ‘I don’t have these numbers – the hostages are all spread out. I don’t have full control over all of them. You attacked Gaza – so maybe you killed more of them,’” Dayan said.
Moreover, he said that “with any deal with Hamas regarding the hostages, they are not interested in getting to the end of the deal, no matter what they receive.”
“Because let’s say we leave Gaza completely and end the war,” he continued.
“As far as Hamas is concerned, it can kill hostages the very next day and say there are no more. Or it can fire two rockets into the Mediterranean Sea off Tel Aviv and declare, ‘I am still alive.’ There is an asymmetry: For us to win, we need to destroy it. For Hamas to win, it just needs to survive.”
Direct negotiations would have been better
In other words, Dayan said that only through direct negotiations could Israel have learned much faster what the actual status of the Hamas hostages was and hold its feet to the fire enough that the terrorist group would not be able to play all sorts of complex negotiation games.
Dayan said that in his extensive experience in negotiations with the Palestinians, Jordan, Syria, and others, “We do best with direct negotiations.”
“I have never seen a US intervention that was good for us. With Jordan, the US wasn’t even in the room, whereas with the [failed 1990s] negotiations with Syria, the US was always in the room. When the US intervenes, it is not as good for whoever is stronger” because Washington tries to balance the playing field,” he said.
He added that US backing for Israel and presence in the region is crucial on many levels, just not necessarily for negotiations with hostile parties.
Pressed about how Israel could have gotten Hamas to agree to direct negotiations given it would have been validly concerned that Jerusalem might seek to kill some of the negotiators (which Israel eventually did), he responded, “If Hamas would say: ‘I can’t do this while under attack,’ then we could have replied: ‘Okay, what do you want?’”
In this case, Dayan said, both sides would understand that Hamas was the one under pressure.
In addition to Dayan, several commentators said that throughout the negotiations, Hamas often used Qatar or Egypt to mislead Israel about its actual stance, and direct negotiations, however controversial, could have disarmed this trick.
Dayan also downplayed the impact that incoming US President-elect Donald Trump has on Hamas.
He said that Trump had clearly heavily pressured Israel about the deal, but that given that he would have been unwilling to use American military power against Hamas and had no direct economic leverage at his disposal to implement against the Gazan terrorist group, direct talks with entire Israeli military and civilian control over Gaza would have gotten a much better deal and much sooner.