Israeli Hostages Are Being Sacrificed to Benjamin Netanyahu’s Political Needs

Imagine being the parent or child of one of the Israeli hostages held in the Gaza Strip by Hamas terrorists, and knowing that your loved ones have been abandoned by your own government for political reasons.

That is precisely what is happening as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insists on changing the terms of the U.S.-backed ceasefire deal in exchange for hostages in a way that will surely destroy it.

The main point of contention concerns a narrow strip of sandy land – known as the Philadelphia Corridor – nine miles long and about 100 yards wide, running along the border between Gaza and Egypt.

Netanyahu initially, in May, appeared to agree to withdraw Israeli troops from the Philadelphia strip at the start of a three-stage deal that would have included the release of dozens of hostages. But he now insists that keeping Israeli forces in the corridor indefinitely is key to defeating Hamas and freeing more hostages.

» READ MORE: Netanyahu’s betrayal of remaining hostages could drag US into regional war in the Middle East | Trudy Rubin

But Israel’s top military and intelligence officials, its defense establishment, and U.S. negotiators all question Netanyahu’s exaggerated claims about Philadelphia and his reasons for making them. As do U.S., Egyptian, and Qatari negotiators, and even members of Israel’s negotiating team.

Everyone believes the prime minister is rejecting any deal not for security reasons but because his right-wing ministers would leave the government and he would lose power.

“To make sure there is no hostage deal that would lead to the collapse of your coalition, you have turned Philadelphia into the rock of our existence,” he accused Nadav Argaman, who headed the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency, from 2016 to 2021, in a speech last week. “No, that is not the case!” he said.

Argaman and many other leading security experts dispute Netanyahu’s claim that Israel must maintain forces along the corridor to prevent Hamas from smuggling weapons from Egypt into Gaza through underground tunnels, saying it distorts history.

After Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, most of Hamas’s arms smuggling from Egypt came overland, through the Rafah border crossing, rather than through the tunnels. For much of that time, Netanyahu was prime minister, and his policy was to allow goods and cash into Gaza as a way (he thought) to bribe Hamas.

Moreover, when Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s military government took power in 2014, it began cracking down on cross-border smuggling into Gaza, viewing it as a threat to its own rule. Now it is willing to do much more because it wants Hamas to be permanently destroyed.

All 10 of the once-major tunnels that led from Egypt (and were connected to countless smaller tunnels in Gaza) are now blocked, Israeli experts told me. That certainly doesn’t mean there won’t be a need to secure the Gaza-Egypt border in the future. But the United States has been working with Egypt for months, consulting with Israeli officials, to develop advanced technological solutions.

“We believe we can fully meet Israel’s security needs along that corridor in a way that will be unprecedented and that will not require any alternative security forces,” a senior administration official told reporters on Wednesday.

Think sensors, iron walls placed deep underground, drones, and much more.

But there are even deeper, strategic reasons why Netanyahu’s focus on Philadelphia is so misleading — and so dangerous.

» READ MORE: Netanyahu Heads Towards Military Response to Gaza Without Exit Strategy | Trudy Rubin

“Not signing this deal poses a greater threat to Israel’s long-term security than actually signing it, and that includes the Philadelphia Corridor issue,” a senior administration official told Israeli media this week.

Why? If there is no ceasefire and Israeli military posts remain on this narrow stretch of road, they will be easy targets for ground attacks, as they were when Israel occupied this corridor before 2005 and suffered dozens of casualties.

“From a military point of view, it is impossible to hold this narrow corridor,” Ami Ayalon, former leader of the Shin Bet from 1995 to 2000, told me by phone from Israel.

“Holding the corridor would mean we would have to reoccupy all of Gaza. And we know what happened when we stayed in Lebanon,” he said. (That’s what happened when Israel withdrew after 18 years of fighting the Hezbollah insurgency.)

Ayalon noted that remaining as an occupying force would embroil the military in another endless rebellion. Occupation would mean controlling two million disenfranchised Gazans living in ruins, which would inevitably lead to a new rebellion. Without hope for a better alternative future, young Gazans will have nothing to lose.

Therefore, Israeli military commanders understand that they have reached the limits of what can be achieved by military force, Ayalon said. They believe they have destroyed Hamas’s infrastructure and leadership and its ability to function as an organization, even if individual terrorists remain.

The time has come for a political agreement, supported by the United States and moderate Arab states, that will stabilize the situation in Gaza and enable the participation of Gulf states and international funds to bring humanitarian aid and reconstruction.

The hostage/ceasefire deal would be a start; if the first phase resulted in an impasse, the military insists it could reverse any withdrawal before moving to the second phase. With Netanyahu saying yes, the pressure on Hamas to accept the deal would be global and immense.

But instead of reaching an agreement, Netanyahu has repeatedly ordered negotiators to negotiate and then publicly denied them, refusing to compromise on Philadelphia.

If the Israeli leader destroys all hopes for a hostage settlement and a ceasefire, there will be no other political prospects for ending the fighting in Gaza.

“After 11 months, the military understands that the lack of a political goal in war becomes a military issue,” Ayalon said. “You send your military to achieve a better political goal, to bring the enemy to a position where they accept your goals, not to kill all your enemies. But if there is no political definition (of the end game), it means that war becomes the goal, not the means. That opens the gate to endless war.”

An endless war in Gaza will further endanger Israel. It will threaten existing peace treaties with Jordan and Egypt (keeping troops in Philadelphia violates the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty). It will fuel the escalation of the war with Hezbollah and tempt Iran to further destabilize the region.

» READ MORE: No more US arms shipments to Israel until Palestinian civilians are protected | Trudy Rubin

“The Arab peace partners will be forced to move away from each other,” predicted Nimrod Novik, a member of the executive committee of Commanders for Israel’s Security who has long had close ties to Egyptian, Saudi and Jordanian security circles. “Normalization with Saudi Arabia will be relegated to the file of missed opportunities. We will see the West Bank moving toward Gaza.”

“I have never worried so much about the fate of Israel,” he told me.

Contrary to Netanyahu’s claims, the failure of the hostage agreement and ceasefire will result in most, if not all, of the remaining hostages being killed.

That is why the demonstrations by the hostage families and their supporters are so crazy, so emotional, so desperate. They know that their loved ones are being sacrificed not for Israel’s security needs, but for the political needs of their prime minister.

The name Philadelphia, meaning “brotherly love,” was probably a black joke when Israeli soldiers gave it to that cursed sandbar in 2006 when they withdrew from Gaza. Given Netanyahu’s misuse of the corridor for his own interests, it should be renamed Philadelphia-lies.