Early Monday morning, Hamas released 20 Israeli hostages in the first phase of a fragile cease-fire plan orchestrated by President Donald Trump and leaders of the Arab world. Phase one includes a partial Israeli withdrawal in Gaza and a flood of aid into the region. It also requires Hamas to dismantle and disarm, an aspect of the plan Hamas currently refuses.
Mike Cosper, senior contributor for The Bulletin, sat down with Haviv Rettig Gur of The Free Press to talk about the tenuous nature of the peace. Here is an edited and condensed excerpt of their conversation.
What is the mood among Israelis today?
Overjoyed. We haven’t slept properly.
There is also tragic relief. Our betrayal of our people is finally over. Because of our history, safety began here in Israel. When Hamas took 251 of our people, we betrayed them deeply. The sense of betrayal has been an overwhelming feeling. The relief is truly palpable. People were weeping in front of the television screens on my street when the news came out.
Israelis are extraordinarily optimistic about the future. They believe they can withstand their enemies and fight back. Then, you ask: What about Israel’s own political leadership? Optimism and trust crashes in the polls. Seventy percent of Israelis don’t want the war to end immediately, because they don’t trust Netanyahu to be capable of managing it and winning it. There’s this sense of distrust.
What’s happening now in regions where Hamas has emerged from the tunnels and is resuming a public presence in Gaza?
Hamas has killed many hundreds in Gaza to maintain its rule while it sat in the tunnels. Not a single civilian has been allowed to step foot into that bomb shelter system in the last two years. Now, Hamas gunmen have emerged from these systems and are out in force on the streets with their guns.
In multiple places, local families and clans independently created order in their territory when Hamas was hiding in tunnels. Hamas is conducting gun battles with those clans now and has issued warnings that it is going to arrest and kill those who criticized them.
We already have seen the disappearances of several dozen critics of Hamas. If you’ve criticized Hamas on social media, they will now come for you. They have announced that they’re going to execute these people.
There are almost no Christians in Gaza because of Hamas, so very few have died in this war. Under Islamist regimes, Christians flee. In Syria, in the most ancient communities in the world, 80 percent are gone. The rest are keeping their heads down.
What happens if, after the hostages are home, Hamas does not agree to decommission arms and digs in its heels?
International pressure on Israel not to resume the war will be enormous—real sanctions could be on the line. That would really hurt the Israeli economy. Any Israeli government will think five times before resuming the war.
The world will also say that all Gaza needs is rebuilding. However, a terrible enemy promises to rebuild its war capabilities to drive Gaza into yet another war. Hamas sought out this war and will seek out another. Their ambitions are the result of 150 years of theological discourse that produced Hamas in a particular stream of Sunni Islam in the Arab world.
If this occurs, Israel will struggle to get back to the war. The Israeli population is exhausted—in the military and at home—from two years of war. If there are no hostages in Gaza, it’ll be harder for the Israelis to explain a return to war.
What that means is Hamas will essentially have retaken Gaza, and it’ll be very hard to redevelop Gaza, to rehabilitate. Gaza is a 25-mile territory with 400 miles of tunnels. It’s in every neighborhood. Nobody has ever been as entrenched as Hamas in Gaza.
If Israel doesn’t return to war, that is an immense relief to Gaza. On the other hand, nobody on earth is willing to fight and die for Hamas to be destroyed. Nobody on earth is willing to die for Gazans. Nobody on earth is willing to die for a future in which Gaza isn’t ruled by Hamas, except Israelis. Gaza will be ruled by Hamas.
If Hamas isn’t removed, Gaza has no future. That’s true if the Israelis are good people in a bad situation, and it’s true if the Israelis are the evil incarnate on earth.
I don’t need people to love Israel. It was a terrible, terrible war. There are thousands of dead kids in Gaza. There’s no way there wasn’t a better way to fight this war. That should be the reaction for every war. It certainly should be the reaction for a war of urban warfare.
This is a terrible, painful war in which the Israelis needed to be very careful; and you can come at them for not being careful. I don’t have any complaints of people who come at the Israelis about the war. However, those who support Hamas are guaranteeing another war. That’s the bottom line.
Listen to the full episode, which released on Tuesday, October 14.
