While low-level talks were taking place in Qatar to work out the details of the implementation of the US “comprehensive bridging proposal” of 16 August, a spokesperson for the Israeli army announced on Sunday that Israeli forces had recovered the bodies of six hostages on 31 August in a tunnel in the western part of the city of Rafah in the Gaza Strip.

An examination by Israel’s Institute of Forensic Medicine found that the six were shot several times at close range. It estimated that they were killed 48 to 72 hours before their bodies were recovered, meaning that they had died on either the previous Thursday or early in the morning on Friday.

One of the six hostages was a 23-year-old US-Israeli citizen, Hersh Goldberg-Polin. Russia’s RT TV network also wrote on its X platform on Monday morning that a Russian national, Alexander Lobanov, was among the six hostages killed.

In a statement released on 31 August, US President Joe Biden said that he was
“devastated and outraged” by the news and added that “Hamas leaders will pay for these crimes.” The US administration would “keep working around the clock for a deal to secure the release of the remaining hostages,” he said.

US Vice-President and Democratic Party candidate in the upcoming US presidential elections Kamala Harris released a statement that was harsher in tone than that made by Biden. She said that the deceased US hostage “was murdered by Hamas,” describing it as an “evil terrorist organisation.”

She went on to say that with “these murders, Hamas has even more American blood on its hands.” Hamas “must be eliminated,” she said, adding that it cannot “control Gaza.” It was a political as well as a campaign statement.

The tragic irony is that a Hamas source told the Agence France Presse news agency last Sunday that three of the hostages were supposed to be freed in the first batch of those to be released by Hamas in the first stage of the ceasefire and hostage-release deal that has been the subject of negotiations for more than two months now.

An Israeli source confirmed this to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, saying that Goldberg-Polin was one of the hostages scheduled for release, with the other two being Eden Yerushalmi and Carmel Gat.

In a recorded statement, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that those who “murder hostages don’t want a deal.”

The Israeli Hostages Families Forum called on Netanyahu to take “responsibility for your mistakes. Take responsibility for the sabotage. Take responsibility for the abandonment,” a reference to the conditions that Netanyahu has decided upon in the ongoing negotiations for a ceasefire deal.

“Take responsibility for the hostages who were murdered in captivity,” the forum said, adding that the families expect Netanyahu “to do everything… in order to bring the hostages home”.

At the same time, Israeli Defence Minister Yaov Gallant called on the Israeli Cabinet to reverse its decision, taken on 30 August, to keep Israeli forces in the Philadelphi Corridor that runs between Egypt and the Gaza Strip. Gallant voted against the decision.

Gallant said that while it was too late for the hostages who had been “murdered in cold blood,” those who “remain alive in captivity must be returned”.

Haaretz published an opinion piece by columnist Alon Pinkas accusing Netanyahu of being a “rogue” head of government and saying that this had one “inevitable consequence: turning Israel into a rogue state”.

He said that “Netanyahu managed to turn a just and justifiable war into Israeli isolation. Most of the world sees it as a near pariah state, certainly the Western liberal democracies.” I could not agree more.

One Israeli minister told Haaretz that one month from now no hostages would be alive in Gaza. Unfortunately, his prediction could prove to be true, as the truth is that neither Netanyahu nor the extremists in his ruling Coalition Government have cared about the fate of the hostages in Gaza. Had they done so, they would have accepted extending the first humanitarian truce last November from one week to a permanent one in order to release all the hostages through diplomatic means.

 More than one hundred hostages were released from captivity at that time. However, instead of working to release the rest of the hostages, Netanyahu has been a proponent of a state of permanent war on multiple fronts and not only in Gaza. The Israeli hostages in Gaza have never been a priority for him, and not a few of them have lost their lives in consequence.

As expected, the families of the hostages staged mass demonstrations on Sunday evening in Israel calling for a ceasefire agreement to free all the remaining hostages in Gaza. The Israeli labour union Histardot also organised a general strike on 2 September, including at Ben Gurion Airport, where employees also went on strike. Ben Gurion is Israel’s main airport that serves many international flights.

Netanyahu’s strategy of keeping Israel in a state of perpetual war has paralysed and polarised the country. Some Israeli observers fear that a civil war between the extremists and the settlers in the West Bank and the rest of Israel could break out in the foreseeable future.

The writer is former assistant foreign minister.

* A version of this article appears in print in the 5 September, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly