It was Hamas that killed the six. And yet…

I am exhausted. It’s been 11 long months of war, with so many dead, wounded or kidnapped, or two out of the three. I just can’t imagine having to go through this any longer – and I am not even a member of the hundreds of families who are desperately waiting for a crumb of information on their captive loved ones or already grieving over fresh graves.

But I’m especially exhausted tonight, having just returned from a Sunday evening protest in Tel Aviv that is being called the single largest turnout of people in Israel demanding the return of the hostages who were brutally kidnapped to the Gaza Strip by Hamas last October 7.

Our anger is first and foremost directed at Hamas, for it is Hamas that cold-bloodedly executed six hostages in a tunnel beneath the southern Gaza Strip. Judging from the autopsies, the six were shot in the head at close range, apparently last Thursday or Friday, when their guards heard what they believed was the approach of IDF soldiers and decided to run.

It is Hamas, of course, that started the whole bloody mess by staging the October surprise attack on border kibbutzim and other local agricultural communities, as well as on towns farther away from the border, and on flimsily protected military installations used for gathering intelligence on the frontier and protecting it.

It is Israel, though – my country – that should have been aware of Hamas’s plans and should have deployed for such an eventuality.

That it wasn’t and didn’t is something that will have to be investigated to the nth degree by a state-sanctioned commission of inquiry. The investigative body should have the power to call witnesses and demand explanations, and then issue recommendations regarding policies that need to be revamped, and people in key positions who need to be replaced and even sanctioned.

In a modern, western democracy, such a commission would be up and running by now. But not in Israel, where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been dragging his feet when it comes to doing anything that could uncover his culpability. He has gone so far as to say the war – which he continues to claim will be a long war – will have to come to an end before there is any investigation into its cause and execution.

One way to end the war would be to reach a deal to exchange hostages in return for an end to the fighting, a withdrawal of Israeli military forces from populated areas – if not all areas – of the Gaza Strip, and the release of terrorists being held in Israeli jails, some with the blood of many Israelis on their hands.

It’s a steep price for Israel to pay, and the debate goes like this: It is very important to obtain the release of the hostages, but it could leave Israel vulnerable to future attacks, whether by decimated Hamas military formations that are allowed to rebuild, rearm and retrain, or by wily and determined terrorists granted a new lease on life following their ticket out of Israeli prisons.

It is a devil’s bargain that understandably gives many people in Israel pause.

Yet the dangers for the country can be mitigated through revamped preparations, improved intelligence-gathering methods – many of which have already proved themselves in the fighting since October 7 – and a new approach to the way Israel looks at its enemies that transcends outdated conceptions that for some reason had become arrogantly embedded in prevailing Israeli views.

Above all, however, there is Israel’s executive branch and its agencies – the cabinet ministers and their ministries – that dictate the policies and prosecution of these policies that oftentimes tie the hands of the bodies charged with carrying them out.

For example, the Israel Defense Forces, the country’s vaunted military, must seek out and obey the directives of a defense minister who might be guided by a set of beliefs that counters those of the top soldiers, or who him or herself might be stymied by the policy demands of the prime minister.

The latter is the situation we are facing today.

The army has strategies and tactics for moves it sees fit to carry out in specific situations: say, the return of the hostages and the destruction of Hamas. The defense minister – in this case Yoav Gallant, a former senior general – for the most part concurs. But his boss, the prime minister, has other worries. And these worries do not always stem from Netanyahu’s efforts to balance his many areas of executive responsibility. Some, in fact, are quite personal and self-centered in nature.

Israel’s prime minister is currently in a fight for his political life. Actually, for his freedom. You see, he’s on trial for alleged corruption, including charges of fraud and bribery that could net him jail time and preclude his participation in politics for up to seven years following his release.

He’ll be 75 next month. Say he’s found guilty and gets just a suspended sentence; there are still those seven years he’ll have to wait before a political comeback. He’ll be 82. Think Joe Biden.

So he’s looking to avoid that, and the best way, in his eyes, is to remain in power as prime minister. To cement matters, he wants a coalition of parties that will do his bidding to weaken the country’s judiciary in any way possible, preferably through legislation that not only ends practices and policies that have led to perceived injustices suffered by Netanyahu’s political cohort, but also puts in place practices and policies that can best mitigate the effects of his personal legal problems.

The parties he has turned to in order to ensure this are the ultra-Orthodox, who want funds for the families of tens of thousands of men who study Torah their whole lives rather than work, and far-right messianists, who want power, territory, new Jewish settlements and a hastening of the End Times they so crave.

The ultra-Orthodox have been given most of their money and, aside from the occasional hiccup, such as demands that their men be drafted into the military, they can be considered Netanyahu’s quiet partners.

The messianists? They are not so quiet.

Their thirst cannot be quenched. If they are allowed to create illegal settlements in the West Bank, they still want a say in the military’s oversight of the area. And now that Israel is embroiled in the Gaza Strip – from which the messianists were ejected in 2005 as part of then-prime minister Ariel Sharon’s surprising decision to withdraw from that problematic piece of land – they will do anything to ensure that the military stays firmly in place, hostage deal or no.

It might on the surface seem easy for Netanyahu to simply ignore his messianist partners. But if he does, they say they’ll bolt his coalition – that same amalgamation of political parties that is sufficient to keep him in power and, most importantly, out of jail.

So there you have it.

Netanyahu’s foot dragging on the hostages can be directly linked to this sector of his coalition. His foot dragging on the establishment of a commission of inquiry can be directly linked to his prospects of being found responsible for the events of October 7 and its aftermath, in which his government sat paralyzed out of pure shock. This would intensify calls for him to resign or declare new elections – both of which would leave him far more open to the possibility of jail time.

What made the news of the latest hostage deaths particularly shocking is that they came immediately after leaked comments from a security cabinet meeting last Thursday – the day that forensic specialists say the six were executed in that Gaza tunnel. The meeting had been called to set Israel’s conditions for sealing a deal with Hamas to release the hostages.

During the meeting, Gallant, Netanyahu’s defense minister, accused him of being willing to leave the hostages to their fate: “The prime minister can indeed make all the decisions, and he can also decide to have all the hostages killed,” he is reported to have said.

Even if these were not the exact words that Gallant used, the gist of his willingness to clash with Netanyahu and the rest of the security cabinet on such a major issue was particularly shocking – even before any of us knew about the discovery of the six hostages’ bodies.

It was a sign that, yes, Netanyahu can remain supremely indifferent to the suffering of others if it somehow contradicts his own personal needs and desires.

It is what those of us at tonight’s protests kept in mind – and at almost 4 a.m. is still keeping me awake.