Israel must make a painful concession if it wants to secure a deal to release the 101 hostages in Gaza, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said during Sunday’s state ceremony to mark the soldiers killed in the last year on Israel's southern and northern borders.
“In carrying out our moral and ethical duty - to return the hostages to their homes, painful compromises are required,” Gallant said.
He spoke as CIA Director William Burns is set to hold a renewed round of hostage talks in Doha on Sunday. Mossad Chief David Barnea is expected to lead the Israeli delegation and is likely to promote a new plan he has been working on with the Qataris and the Egyptians to bring the hostages home.
The US and Israel have been hopeful that in the aftermath of the IDF’s assassination of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar earlier this month, it is now possible to make a deal.
Qatar and Egypt, the two main mediators for a deal, have both spoken with Hamas since Sinwar’s killing, but it’s unclear if Hamas would be open to releasing the hostages.
Gallant has been at odds with Netanyahu about the concessions needed to make a deal, urging greater flexibility that the Prime Minister has publicly displayed. Security officials in the last months have said that Netanyahu’s stances have made it harder to achieve a deal, even as the United States has stressed that Sinwar had been the stumbling bloc to a deal.
Gallant said on Sunday “This is the place to point out that not every goal can be achieved only through military action, force is not a be-all and end-all.”
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken held a series of diplomatic meetings prior to Sunday’s summit, visiting Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar last week. Time is tight for the Biden administration given that US President Joe Biden’s four-year term in office ends on January 20.
Sunday’s talks mark the first high-level meeting since Hamas executed six of the hostages at the end of August, including Israeli-American citizen Hersh Goldberg-Polin, 23.
Until his killing, the US had advanced a three-phase deal first unveiled at the end of May. It has yet to finalize all the details of even the first phase.
At issue has been Hamas’s insistence that Israel must end the war and the IDF must fully withdraw from all of Gaza, including the Philadelphi Corridor. The May deal had been designed to allow for a deal to partially get underway without dealing with some of the irreconcilable differences.
There are now growing calls for the US to scrap the May deal, which always had a protracted timetable for a hostage release, and to consider a new framework. Blinken himself hinted at this possibility last week.
Barnea has spoken of leveraging pressure from Iran and Hezbollah on Hamas to make a deal by linking a ceasefires in Gaza with one in Lebanon. The US has clarified that the two ceasefire efforts are not linked.
At Sunday’s meeting, Barnea is expected to promote a new deal he has worked on with the United States, Qatar, Egypt, and the Egyptians.
US seeks minor agreements
There have also been reports of mini-deal, that see the release of a small number of hostages in exchange for a short pause in the war.
In the aftermath of the IDF’s killing of Sinwar, Israel is under increased pressure to sign off on a deal that would both end the war and see the hostages released.