Did Bibi ‘decide to kill all the hostages’?

We’ve learned that, during the course of an Israeli security cabinet meeting on Thursday (Aug. 29), there was a heated argument between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant over Hamas’s demand that the release of some of the remaining Israeli hostages be conditional upon removal of all Israeli troops from the Philadelphi Corridor—the strip of land inside Gaza that runs along the border with Egypt. When Netanyahu refused to agree to that condition, Gallant asserted: “The prime minister can indeed make all the decisions, and he can also decide to kill all the hostages.”

This is a startling assertion for the defense minister to make about the prime minister, and it is an assertion that, both legally and morally, is entirely untrue.  Nothing the prime minister, or any other Israeli, has said or done is tantamount to a decision to kill all the hostages.

If (Heaven forbid) none of the remaining hostages are returned alive, the legal and moral guilt for their deaths will lie solely upon the terrorists who seized them from Israel and abducted them to Gaza, putting them all in mortal danger. No Israeli will share any part of that legal or moral guilt—no official in the Israeli government, no member of the IDF, and no ordinary Israeli citizen. Only the grotesque miscreant Sinwar and his Islamist comrades will bear the guilt for those legal and moral depravities.

Reasonable people may disagree about how much Israel’s future security depends on keeping IDF troops in the Corridor, and how to balance that against everyone’s fervent desire to see the remaining hostages freed. Any legitimate government has an obligation, in making important decisions, to take into account the well-being, both present and future, of all of its citizens, and not that of only a few. Israel has a population of almost ten million persons; there are approximately one hundred hostages, some of whom are dead, and the proposed ceasefire deal would release only some of them. Everyone holding office in the Israeli government, up to and including the prime minister, has a duty to try to take decisions that will be best, on balance, for all the citizens of Israel.

We now know that Gaza’s border with Egypt was punctured with a myriad of tunnels, and those tunnels were used to transport war material into Gaza that was used by Hamas and other terrorists to kill Israelis. The government of Egypt either turned a blind eye to the weapons smuggling or actively assisted it. Neither Egyptian troops nor any force provided by “the international community” can be relied upon to destroy all the existing tunnels and to ensure that no new tunnels are constructed. Only the IDF would have the means and, most crucially, the will to do so.

There are questions as to whether Israel could install technological devices that would be able to detect attempts to construct new tunnels. But after the horrific failure of technological devices to effectively detect the invasion from Gaza on October 7, it is perhaps understandable if some people are reluctant to rely on such devices in the Corridor. It is not irrational to think that Israel’s security is best protected if, along with whatever technology might be installed, IDF troops remain on the ground in the Corridor.

Balanced against the foregoing considerations are the well-being and the very lives of the hostages, and the fervent wishes of their families. These are tremendously weighty factors. The surviving hostages must be experiencing a living hell, and their families are suffering as well. The families of deceased hostages long to decently bury the mortal remains of their loved ones.

I cannot say how these different, conflicting considerations should be balanced against each other. I don’t know whether the right answer is to accept or reject Hamas’s demand that the IDF withdraw from the Corridor. My best judgment is that there is no one “right” answer–different reasonable people will come to different conclusions. But I do know, as I’ve already said, that whatever decision is ultimately made by Israel’s government, only the terrorists will be responsible for the killing of those hostages who have already died or who may die in the future. Each one of those killings is a murder, and the murderers are the terrorists.

It is one thing to say that Israel’s government ought to agree to withdraw its troops from the Corridor so that some of the hostages can be returned; the defense minister has every right to express that opinion. It is a very different thing to say that, if Israel’s government and particularly the prime minister refuse to agree to a withdrawal, then the prime minister will have in effect decided to kill all the hostages. The latter statement evidences the kind of internal Israeli disunity that can only encourage enemies, who will think: Israelis will not blame terrorists even if hostages are killed; they will blame their own prime minister.

The defense minister’s assertion about what the prime minister “can decide” reflects and surely resulted from the enormous pressures on senior Israeli government officials. Defense Minister Gallant was formerly a major general in the IDF and a commander of the IDF’s Southern Command; no one can question his life-long patriotic devotion to Israel. But in what was obviously a heated moment in a discussion that was not meant to be publicized, he said something about the prime minister that never should have been said. His statement was subsequently leaked to the press and broadcast to the public. He should now publicly disavow that statement.