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Baskin has served as a shadow peace negotiator with a variety of Palestinian factions. He played a central role in negotiating the Shalit deal and has continued to work behind the scenes on hostage issues since October 7. Hamas, he said, knew the only chance to free the “impossibles”—high-value Palestinian prisoners including those who had been convicted of killing Israelis—would be to take large numbers of military personnel hostage. “For the soldiers, they wanted to free all the Palestinian prisoners in Israel, those serving life sentences,” Baskin said. “At that time, there were 559 Palestinians serving life sentences. That was their main target, getting all of them.” Eventually, under both domestic and international pressure, Netanyahu agreed to a limited exchange deal. During a brief truce last November, Hamas released 105 civilian hostages to Israel in return for 240 Palestinians—mostly women and children—held captive by Israel. “[Hamas] made a quick deal with the Israelis,” said Baskin. “It was three prisoners for every hostage. I think that was an amazingly low price.” Ghazi Hamad, the Hamas official who worked with Sinwar, was emphatic that Hamas did not intend to take Israeli civilians hostage. “What we planned was just for military purposes, just to destroy this part of the Israeli army who controls the situation in Gaza and to take some hostages from the military—soldiers—in order to make a kind of exchange,” he said. “I don't deny that there were some mistakes done by some people, but I am talking about the decision of Hamas, the policy of Hamas.” Baskin told me it was immediately clear that Hamas did not prepare for holding so many civilians and was caught off guard when other Palestinian groups and individuals who flooded into Israel that day took large numbers of hostages, including senior citizens and children. “They ended up simply taking people back into Gaza without thinking about the logistics, about what price they wanted for them,” Baskin said. “From day four of the war, I was talking to Hamas already about a deal for the women, the children, the elderly, and the wounded, which I thought was the low hanging fruit, because Hamas would not have been set up to deal with them. They wanted to get rid of them.” Israel has used the civilian hostages as the primary justification for their continued siege. Hamad confirmed that negotiations began almost immediately after the October 7 attacks. He told me that “from the first week, we talked to some people, some mediators, that we want to return the civilians, but Israel refused.” Hamad added that Hamas informed international mediators last November that it was working to track down more civilian hostages taken by other groups or individuals so it could return them to Israel. “We asked them, ‘Please give us time now to look for people,’” Hamad said. “But Israel did not listen to us and they continued to kill people.” A major point of contention in the current negotiations, Hamas negotiators told me, is Israel’s continued refusal to free Palestinians it characterizes as terrorists with “Jewish blood on their hands.” Hamas has insisted that if Israel wants its soldiers returned, it must free Palestinian resistance fighters, including those convicted of murdering Israelis. In the negotiations, Israel has insisted it maintain veto power over Hamas’s list of Palestinian prisoners it wants freed in any deal. Hamas negotiators told me that the fact that their forces have managed to sustain a nine-month armed insurgency against Israel in Gaza despite being outgunned and subjected to large-scale attacks with powerful weapons provided by the U.S. has sent a message to the negotiators that Hamas has its own red lines. “Nine months have passed and our resistance has not been exhausted, nor has it relented, nor has it subsided,” said the spokesperson for the Qassam Brigades, known by his nom de guerre Abu Obeida, in a July 7 audio message. “We are still fighting in Gaza without support or external supply of weapons and equipment, and our people are still persevering without food, water, or medicine, and under a criminal, unjust genocide war.” Last weekend, Netanyahu released a list of what he called “non-negotiables” in any agreement with Hamas. Among these was preventing the smuggling of weapons from Egypt, the return of a maximum number of living Israeli captives held in Gaza, and barring Hamas fighters from returning to northern Gaza. The most contentious aspect of Netanyahu’s list is his insistence that Israel reserve the right to resume its full-scale war in Gaza, a notion that Hamas has consistently rejected. Hamad believes the mediators, including those from the U.S., are aware that Netanyahu views the continuation of the war as linked to his own political survival. While a preliminary agreement may be reached for another exchange of captives, Netanyahu has reiterated his vow to destroy Hamas militarily. “He wants to prove that he is [continuing the war] in order to achieve his big goals or what's called the ‘total victory’ in Gaza. But I think he could not convince even the Israeli community, the Israeli parties and his partners in the coalition,” Hamad said. “Every day that he is losing soldiers and tanks, what’s the big achievement of Netanyahu? To kill civilians. So I think that the negotiation is stuck on this point, that there is no seriousness, strong will from the Israeli side to have an agreement with Hamas.” “If you look to the text on both sides, it is easy to bridge the gaps,” Hamad added. “Israel is working very hard in order not to achieve an agreement, because I think that this agreement will dismantle the coalition in Israel. I think this will be the end of the political career for Netanyahu.” A tuktuk driver rushes to transport casualties after Israeli bombardment at al-Bureij refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip on July 8, 2024. Photo: Eyad Baba/AFP via Getty. An Unsustainable Status Quo The October 7 attacks are often portrayed by U.S. leaders as having occurred in a historical vacuum—an alternative reality where Hamas, unprovoked, obliterated the peace. But for the people of Gaza, there has been no true peace. For 76 years, only a morsel of freedom has ever existed and for most of the past two decades it was restricted to the imaginations of a people confined to an open air prison surrounded by the occupation’s military bases and dotted by gated communities housing Israelis enjoying life in a bucolic setting. In the years preceding the October 7 attacks, under presidents Trump and Biden, Hamas watched as Israel became more emboldened as prospects for Palestinian liberation receded to the footnotes of Washington-led initiatives aimed at normalizing relations between Israel and Arab nations like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. Netanyahu’s position was: “We must not give the Palestinians a veto over new peace treaties with Arab states.” Just two weeks before the October 7 attacks, the Israeli leader delivered a speech at the UN general assembly in New York, brandishing a map of what he promised could be the “New Middle East.” It depicted a state of Israel that stretched continuously from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. Gaza and the West Bank, as Palestinian lands, were erased. During that speech, Netanyahu portrayed the full normalization of relations with Saudi Arabia as the linchpin of his vision for this “new” reality, one which would open the door to a “visionary corridor that will stretch across the Arabian Peninsula and Israel. It will connect India to Europe with maritime links, rail links, energy pipelines, fiber-optic cables.” “When Palestinians look at the region, they feel genuinely abandoned by their own leaders.” Hamas monitored these developments carefully and saw the U.S. moves toward circumventing a Palestinian resolution in its normalization campaign as an existential threat. “If Saudi Arabia signed, it means the whole region, when it comes to the Palestinian question, will collapse. It is not a plan. It is not a peace process. It is an integration of Israel in the newly created Middle East. They have started to talk about Middle East NATO,” Naim said. “It is a coup against the heritage, the history, the values of this region and against the future, all this together.” According to Abulhawa, “The status quo was unsustainable and untenable, especially when Arab leaders began normalizing and the writing was on the wall for our total disappearance and total destruction.”