There is a frightening defect in the Israel-Hamas ‘deal’ – the terrorists live to fight on

On October 7 2023, Hamas murdered more than 1,200 people in Israel and abducted 251. The deal which begins its enactment tomorrow, provides for the release, in phases, of the estimated 94 hostages still held by Hamas, of whom, the Israeli government calculates, 34 are dead. In return, Israel will let hundreds of Palestinian terrorist prisoners out of its jails, withdraw its troops from densely populated areas of Gaza and let in 600 aid-carrying lorries every day.

Most of the world seems pleased. There are reasons to be so, and I shall come back to them. But first it needs to be said that the deal represents two major victories for Hamas.

One is that it legitimates them as a continuing force in Gaza. They will remain on the ground and Israel will not. Hamas now know they will be part of future negotiations. Plenty of malign actors – many of them in Western governments, policy elites and media – will even start to hail them as peacemakers.

The other is that the deal will prove to the satisfaction of Hamas that hostage-taking works. If they had simply murdered those 1,200 plus people on October 7, they would have won themselves no protection against Israeli retaliation. Because they took the hostages, they were able to make Israel hesitate, divide Israeli politics, manipulate Western opinion and gain diplomatic advantage.

When (if) Hamas stick to the deal, dump 34 dishonoured corpses on Israel and hand back about 60 tormented, sick, hungry, terrified men, women and children, the direct evidence of their evil will be there for all to see, and yet they will be widely praised outside Israel for having done the right thing. That will be disgusting.

The deal will also be seen in Islamist minds as a successful precedent. Capture Jews, will be the internal message, torture them, kill a proportion of them, play cat-and-mouse about the ones who live, and it will give you power. So, when you get the chance, do it again.

I invoke an unlikely source in support of my argument. After its usual, almost daily rant by Jeremy Bowen about how absolutely everything is the fault of Benjamin Netanyahu, the BBC Today programme yesterday morning interviewed Oliver McTernan.

Mr McTernan is a former Catholic priest who, like most in the “conflict resolution” business, is essentially anti-Israel. He said that it was “incompatible” for Israel to try to destroy Hamas while also trying to negotiate with them over hostages.

He is right, though for the wrong reason. He meant that Israel should give up trying to destroy Hamas and instead negotiate the hostage releases. A clearer analysis points in the opposite direction – that destroying Hamas should take precedence over hostage release. Otherwise, the lesson will go on echoing down the years: terrorism works.

Oh, come on, some readers may say, Israel is winning. In the later months of last year, it killed Yahya Sinwar and most of Hamas’s leaders. It blew up most of the command structure of Hezbollah via their pagers and killed their supreme murderer, Hassan Nasrallah. It proved it could penetrate Iranian defences at the heart of Tehran. It knew exactly when to attack Syrian military installations as Bashar al-Assad fell. Surely, it should “take the win”.

It is true that, by wisely defying the advice of Joe Biden, Jake Sullivan and Antony Blinken (let alone of the rest of world) at almost every turn, Israel mostly eschewed ceasefires and eventually had the enemy on the run. The Israel Defence Forces saved the Jewish nation from the genocide of which the October 7 attacks were intended as the first move. Theirs is the greatest and most disciplined heroism shown since the Six-Day War of 1967.

But Yayha Sinwar had a kid brother called Mohammed, who is busy trying to stick everything together again. And whereas, after the siege of Beirut in 1982, the PLO leader Yasser Arafat had to set sail and flee to Tunis, Hamas will still be in Gaza, still intimidating the civilian population, controlling the hospitals and the Palestinian media (who, says Jeremy Bowen, “do a great job”), looting the aid, still winked at by large elements of UN and other relief organisations. Israel has scotched the snake, not killed it.

In such circumstances, the “martyrdom” of Hamas leaders may even be good propaganda for them. “Look,” the survivors will say, “Even under the satanic attack of the Jews, backed by America, we fought on. Allah is with us!” The politicised International Criminal Court stands ready to secularise such thoughts and weaponise them for lawfare for decades to come.

A stronger argument for some deal is the change in American politics. This week’s effort is supposed to be the first example of what Donald Trump, even before he reaches office, can deliver in a way that poor old Biden never could.

In early December, Mr Trump warned Hamas of “hell to pay” if they did not come to heel; the Qataris, it seems, have drummed it into Hamas heads that this is their last chance. In Israel, the deal is being sold to doubters with encouraging words about how, if Hamas misbehave again, Trump will let it go after them in a way that Biden would have forbidden.

On top of this comes the added point, also strong, that all the moderate powers in the Arab world are much readier to deal with an Israel that is strong than one which is beleaguered and debilitated. The smashing of the Hamas and Hezbollah leadership and of related Iranian power was wonderful news, for example, for the Gulf Arabs, Egypt and Jordan.

For Donald Trump, the biggest and ultimate prize, which would build on what he achieved last time in office with the Abraham Accords, is a Middle-East peace deal that protects Israel, kills Iran’s nuclear ambitions and brings in Saudi Arabia. This might create the conditions, if not for a two-state “solution” (can anyone really believe such a conflict can be “solved”?), at least for the gradual development of some parallel Palestinian republic alongside Israel.

One must accept that a deal guaranteed by a powerful Trump administration is a much more hopeful thing than anything that could have emerged in the feeble Biden years (including the deal remarkably similar to the present one which was on offer in July last year, before Israel had won its famous victories). However, what makes Mr Trump look good is not automatically what is best for Israel’s security and a peaceful Middle East.

Friends of Ukraine fear that Trump’s self-image as the big dealmaker who brings peace could let Vladmir Putin come out on top. Friends of Israel should not imagine that a Trump Gaza deal is risk-free.

The real agony, of course, is Israel’s. As the country founded to offer refuge to Jews everywhere, it has a Talmudically inspired duty to rescue them wherever it can. It is pierced, too, by the deep personal pain inflicted on so many families. Politically, it may be that there is an Israeli consensus round the idea that this deal is, as one Jewish friend expert in the region put it to me, “bad, but essential”.

But I cannot let go of the point that, with this deal, Hamas have prised open the jaws of defeat and won, if not a victory, at least the chance to live and fight and murder for much more than another day.