While Israel has an extensive list of hostages, Hamas has never made such a list or provided one. It occasionally released selected hostage videos or claimed that one or another hostage was deceased. Truthfully or not. The actual list of hostages, most people have concluded, is a lot smaller.
Every terrible ceasefire proposal on Israel’s side still requires Hamas to produce a list o hostages. And Hamas generally replies by offering to trade terrorists for hostages or their bodies.
And every time it’s asked about the hostages, Hamas claims not to know.
“No one has an idea” of how many of the remaining 120 hostages in Gaza are still alive, Hamas official Osama Hamdan, currently based in Lebanon, admitted in an interview with CNN on Thursday.
“I don’t have any idea about that,” he told CNN from a Beirut office. “No one has an idea about this.”
Hamas knows but it prefers strategic ambiguity because the hostages are the only possible lever that can save it. The Biden administration and elements of the Israeli Left are obsessed with saving Hamas. But the only stated reason that elements of the Israeli political system would agree to suspend the war would be to save the hostages. Without hostages, there is only the cold brute reality of Oct 7.
Ending the war to save 100+ hostages and ending the war to save 31, 19 or 8 hostages plays differently.
The real question is how many Israelis have to die or be taken hostage next time around. That’s why making the war about the hostages was always a mistake.
You don’t fight a war to get back hostages, you fight it to keep hostages from being taken.
The existence of the hostages allowed Hamas and its useful idiots, including in Jerusalem, to play a game in which once again anything is acceptable in exchange for getting them back.
Hamas has already said that it will carry out Oct 7 over and over again.
The real question is not how many Hamas terrorists can be released per hostage, but how many Oct 7s can be perpetrated per hostage.
{Reposted from FrontPageMag}
