Hostage deaths build pressure on Netanyahu for Hamas deal

For 10 months, the families of Israeli hostages held by Hamas have led protests, blanketed local and international media and begged Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to agree a deal that would bring their loved ones home.

So far, they have failed. But on Sunday, as the news spread that six more hostages had been found dead in a tunnel underneath Gaza, apparently executed by their captors less than a kilometre from Israeli troops, a new wave of public anger swept Israel, much of it directed at Netanyahu.

Frustration has become more intense because of the realisation that time is quickly running out for the remaining 101 hostages in Hamas custody. At least 35 of them are already presumed dead by Israeli officials.

Hamas has blamed Sunday’s hostage deaths, and many previous captive fatalities, on Israeli air strikes and Netanyahu’s intransigence. It has not shifted in its core demand that any comprehensive hostage release hinges on a complete ceasefire.

Relatives of the captives, meanwhile, are growing more desperate. “We see that more and more hostages are dying and being murdered in captivity,” said Daniel Lifshitz, the grandson of Oded Lifshitz, an 84-year-old hostage. “And we have to try whatever we can do to bring them home.”

Israel’s military has so far rescued only eight of the roughly 240 people taken hostage on October 7 and has killed three by mistake. But 105 were released in November in a negotiated swap for Palestinian prisoners, under the cover of a shortlived ceasefire that saw humanitarian aid surge into the besieged enclave.

A second negotiated hostage-for-prisoner swap has proved elusive, despite a mid-August push by the US, Egypt and Qatar to persuade the warring parties to agree to a US-backed proposal. The lack of progress has led to a public blame game that has divided Israeli politics, exasperated mediators and pushed any deal further into the future.

Talks appear to have stalled because Hamas has demanded assurances that a lasting ceasefire will follow the hostage swap, and that Israeli troops will withdraw completely from Gaza. For his part, Netanyahu has dug down on demands that the Israeli military remains in control of the Gaza-Egypt border.

“The delay in signing the deal has led to [Sunday’s] deaths and those of many other hostages,” said the Hostage and Missing Families forum, an advocacy group. “We call to Netanyahu: Stop hiding. Provide the public with a justification for this ongoing abandonment.”

It remains to be seen whether this fresh anger will coalesce into enough political pressure to force Netanyahu to change his position that continued military force in Gaza is the best way to secure a better hostage swap.

On Sunday, analysts said, the national mood appeared to be shifting, albeit slowly, as much of the media and political opposition demanded Netanyahu compromise.

After many months of pleas by the families of the captives, Israel’s largest workers’ union declared a national strike on Monday in support of a hostage deal. Ben-Gurion airport will shut on Monday morning, as will most of the country as the opposition calls for massive street protests.

“I spoke to many political and security officials, and heard that a deal is not progressing because of political considerations,” said Arnon Bar-David, chair of the Histadrut labour federation. “We need to reach a deal, a deal is more important than anything.”

Tel Aviv’s mayor said government offices would be closed on Monday morning, and many businesses, from restaurants to cinemas, were already shutting down. Two smaller municipalities said they would also close their offices.

Dahlia Scheindlin, a veteran pollster who has followed the protest movement closely, said that while there was no institutional mechanism to turn public sentiment into forcing the government to reach a deal, “if . . . there is a general strike and influential social and political leaders help bring the country to a standstill, that could possibly tip the government into changing its policy”.

Netanyahu responded forcefully to the accusation that his demands over the Egypt-Gaza border had held up a possible deal, saying Hamas had refused to enter serious negotiations for months. He said Israel had agreed to an updated August 16 framework for the US-backed deal.

Hamas officially rejected those changes, which are still not public, and demanded the US return to the original deal it offered.

“In recent days, as Israel has been holding intensive negotiations with the mediator in a supreme effort to reach a deal, Hamas is continuing to steadfastly refuse all proposals,” Netanyahu said. “Even worse, at the exact same time, it murdered six of our hostages.”

“Whoever murders hostages does not want a deal,” he said.

His far-right allies rushed to his support, painting Israelis eager to make a deal as weak. “The Cabinet will not allow a surrender deal that would abandon Israel’s security, but will direct the IDF and the security establishment to exact heavier prices from Hamas,” said Bezalel Smotrich, the far-right finance minister, on social media platform X.

But leaks to Israel’s Channel 12 news over the weekend painted a different picture, enraging many of the families of the hostages, who have long warned that Netanyahu was delaying a deal to keep his coalition, which depends on the support of Smotrich and other extreme-right ministers, together.

Netanyahu had introduced a vote at a Thursday security cabinet supporting his demand that Israeli troops remain along the Egypt-Gaza border, on a stretch of land called the Philadelphi corridor.

Channel 12 reported that he clashed with his defence minister, Yoav Gallant, who warned that the position threatened the talks to free the hostages and voted against it.

“The cabinet must gather immediately and reverse the decision made on Thursday,” said Gallant after the bodies were retrieved. “It is too late for the hostages who were murdered in cold blood.”

The Israeli public has largely supported a negotiated deal with Hamas to free the hostages, according to several polls, but regular protests in Tel Aviv have yet to coalesce into a large national movement and have been eclipsed in size by even the anti-judicial reform protests just a few months before October 7. Monday’s national strike could change that.

Meanwhile, Netanyahu and his allies have insisted that continued military force in Gaza, where the Israeli army continues to operate after ten months, will push Hamas to release hostages with fewer conditions.

But Hamas has maintained a core demand since indirect talks first began weeks into the war — that the release of all the hostages, which includes many Israeli soldiers, requires a complete ceasefire in the Gaza Strip.

About 40,000 Palestinians have been killed since October 7, according to local health officials, most of them women and children, as the Israeli military has destroyed swaths of the besieged enclave.

The war has created a rapidly deepening humanitarian crisis marked by extreme hunger, the spread of diseases and the displacement of most of Gaza’s 2.3mn civilians into UN shelters and sprawling tent cities. Netanyahu’s rightwing allies have demanded that humanitarian aid into the enclave be constricted to force Hamas to release the hostages.

The two sides have agreed to pause fighting in areas of Gaza for at least eight hours daily from Sunday to Tuesday to allow the UN World Health Organization and Palestinian medics to begin a complex operation to vaccinate 640,000 children.