“Hersh, it’s Mom. We’re working day and night to come get you, we’ll never give up.” On Thursday, August 29, whispering these few words at the border with the Gaza Strip, a microphone in her hand, Rachel Goldberg-Polin tried to reassure her son, held since October 7 by Hamas. Three days later, she learned that the terrorists had executed him with a bullet to the head, like five other Israeli hostages. These deaths filled Israel with sadness and despair. Anger, above all.
If Hamas is guilty of these murders, the families of the hostages hold Benjamin Netanyahu responsible for their abandonment. “The delay in signing the agreement [avec le Hamas] led to these and many other hostage deaths, said the Families Forum, one of Israel’s largest lobby groups. We call on Netanyahu to stop hiding and publicly justify this abandonment.” At the head of a coalition of right-wing and far-right groups, the prime minister swears by force to save the Israeli captives, dragging out negotiations with Hamas. However, since the terrorist attack, only eight of the 240 hostages have been freed by the Israeli army, while 105 returned home thanks to the November truce.
The families of the hostages have convinced a large majority of Israelis of the interest in an agreement with Hamas to free their loved ones: 67% make it a priority for the country, against 26 who prefer to continue the war at all costs (Channel 12 poll of July 6). But they have not succeeded in reaching the only man whose decision really counts.
Prime Minister trapped by his far-right allies
Neither international pressure, nor the general strike declared on September 2, nor the public criticism of his generals have deflected “Bibi” from his maximalist strategy against Hamas. “He who kills hostages does not want an agreement,” Netanyahu declared. Despite his apologies to the families of the hostages executed on Sunday, the Prime Minister reiterated the following day his determination to maintain military control of the Philadelphia Corridor, which separates the Gaza Strip from Egypt and is the key to an agreement with Hamas. If neither side gives in on this issue, the war will continue and the dead will continue to pile up. More than 40,000 people have already been killed on the Palestinian side…
“Bibi” knows that if he accepts a ceasefire, his fundamentalist allies Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich will leave the coalition and bring down his government. These two far-right ministers dream of expelling the Palestinians from the West Bank in order to annex these territories. They have no interest in the war ending. “Ben Gvir and Smotrich are taking advantage of the fighting in Gaza to advance their projects in the West Bank; they cannot dream of a better scenario,” says Michael Koplow, research director at the Israel Forum Policy. “As long as Netanyahu still thinks he has a future in politics, he is trapped with these ministers.”
For now, the prime minister fears Smotrich and Ben Gvir more than hundreds of thousands of protesters on the Israeli streets. If the general strike and protests grow, if “the streets of Israel are on fire,” as one of his ministers anonymously confessed to the Israeli press, then Netanyahu may cave. Otherwise, the dead will continue to fall, both Palestinian and Israeli.