Liri Albag, one of five female IDF soldiers still being held hostage in Gaza, was the subject of Hamas’s most recently released video. The video of Liri alive was filmed on Jan. 1. Available online on pro-Hamas websites, it shows the 19-year-old in emotional distress, shaking at times, as she begged for her life.
The hostages have been held in Gaza for 457 days. And the question of why they are still there, why has Israel been unable to bring them home, gets asked with increased frustration and alarm every day from all quarters.
On Saturday, we received an answer to that question. Shortly after news broke of the release of the video of Liri Albag, The New York Times published an interview with outgoing U.S. Secretary of State Tony Blinken. Blinken said that Hamas has refused to agree to release the hostages in exchange for a ceasefire for two reasons.
In his words, “There have been two major impediments, and they both go to what drives Hamas. One has been whenever there has been public daylight between the United States and Israel and the perception that pressure was growing on Israel, we’ve seen it: Hamas has pulled back from agreeing to a ceasefire and the release of hostages.
“The other thing that got Hamas to pull back was their belief, their hope that there would be a wider conflict, that Hezbollah would attack Israel, that Iran would attack Israel, that other actors would attack Israel, and that Israel would have its hands full and Hamas could continue what it was doing.”
Almost immediately after the Oct. 7 invasion, then-Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced a siege of Gaza. The move was self-explanatory. The Gazans had taken 256 Israelis hostage to Gaza. So long as they weren’t released, Gaza would remain under siege. Siege warfare has long been considered one of the most humane, least destructive forms of warfare, and it is legal under the laws of war.
The Biden administration would have none of it. Blinken described how he compelled Israel to resupply Hamas from day one of the war.
“We’ve said from Day 1 that how Israel does that matters. And throughout, starting on Day 1, we tried to ensure that people had what they needed to get by. The very first trip that I made to Israel five days after Oct. 7, I spent with my team nine hours in the IDF’s headquarters in Tel Aviv, six stories underground with the Israeli government, including the prime minister, including arguing for hours on end about the basic proposition that the humanitarian assistance needed to get to Palestinians in Gaza.
“And that was an argument that took place, because you had in Israel in the days after Oct. 7 a totally traumatized society. This wasn’t just the prime minister or a given leader in Israel. This was an entire society that didn’t want any assistance getting to a single Palestinian in Gaza. I argued that for nine hours.
“President Biden was planning to come to Israel a few days later. And in the course of that argument, when I was getting resistance to the proposition of humanitarian assistance getting in, I told the prime minister, I’m going to call the president and tell him not to come if you don’t allow this assistance to start flowing. And I called the president to make sure that he agreed with that, and he fully did. We got the agreement to begin assistance through Rafah, which we expanded to Kerem Shalom and many other places.”
So, to fend off an assault from an anti-Israel reporter, Blinken explained that President Joe Biden wouldn’t visit Israel until Israel capitulated to Blinken’s demand that it feed and water the people of Gaza who supported Hamas’s decision to take 256 Israeli children, babies, women and men hostage. Blinken also admitted that the reason that the 100 hostages are still in Gaza is that Hamas perceives the administration as pressuring Israel to capitulate to Hamas.
Blinken could have added that by demanding that Israel feed the people of Gaza, he and Biden removed any fear Hamas leaders might have had that the people would overthrow them. Unconcerned with that prospect, Hamas felt no pressure to release the hostages.
It bears noting that when Blinken arrived on Oct. 12, 2023, Israel still didn’t know how many of its citizens had been taken hostage. It still didn’t have a clear assessment of how many people were dead. Hundreds of victims had yet to be identified due to Hamas’s mutilation and destruction of their bodies. Just last week, Israelis learned that half of the 1,200 Israelis butchered that day were beheaded.
What was most notable about Blinken’s admission is that he didn’t appear to believe that there was anything wrong with the policies he imposed on Israel. Many military leaders have argued persuasively that had Blinken and Biden left Israel to pursue its siege strategy, combined with airstrikes, Israel could have fomented Hamas’s capitulation, or at least its surrender of the hostages, by the end of 2024. While Blinken’s statements indicated that he is at least in partial agreement with that assessment, he gave no indication that he felt remorse for the devastating impact his policies have had on the hostages or for the fact that those policies are a primary reason that the war is still ongoing.
The question is whether his assessment will impact his actions in his last two weeks in office.
Last week, Michael Doran, senior fellow and director at the Hudson Institute and a former member of the U.S. National Security Council, told Dr. Gadi Taub on their Israeli Update podcast that the Biden administration intends to use its allegation that Israel is not providing sufficient supplies to Gaza to permanently undermine Israel’s international position. Doran explained that the administration intends to use Section 620(i) of the Foreign Assistance Act, which asserts “that any country that is blocking U.S. humanitarian aid will have its military assistance cut off,” against Israel.
Seemingly backing up Doran, in his interview with the New York Times, Blinken alluded to a letter that he and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin sent their Israeli interlocutors in early October alleging that Israel was in violation of Section 620(i).
Doran said, “The January surprise is that there will be an official finding by the State Department that Israel is in violation of 620(i). It’s blocking humanitarian aid to Gaza, and then what will happen is that the president will waive the penalties for blocking of the humanitarian aid, but there will have been an official American finding.”
That finding, Doran explained, will be used as the basis of a U.N. Security Council resolution put forward by Algeria or Slovenia. It will also be used by the International Criminal Court, the European Union and other bodies to strike out at Israel.
Later last week, Channel 14 reported that the administration is enabling a resolution to be put forward at the U.N. Security Council that would require Israel to withdraw from Gaza, and perhaps from Lebanon and Syria. The idea is that other Security Council members would put forward the resolution and the U.S. will permit it to pass by abstaining, as the Obama administration abstained from Resolution 2234, which passed in the Security Council in December 2016, after President-elect Donald Trump was elected to his first term in office. That resolution declared all Israeli communities in eastern Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria illegal.
Doran shared that there are two camps in the administration regarding the planned move. Many senior officials support moving forward. But several senior officials oppose the move. He said that the ultimate decision will be made by Blinken.
Towards the end of his interview with the Times, Blinken lashed out at the international forces that have not held Hamas responsible for the suffering it has caused and continues to cause.
In his words, “One of the things that I found a little astounding throughout is that for all of the understandable criticism of the way Israel has conducted itself in Gaza, you hear virtually nothing from anyone since Oct. 7 about Hamas. Why there hasn’t been a unanimous chorus around the world for Hamas to put down its weapons, to give up the hostages, to surrender—I don’t know what the answer is to that. Israel, on various occasions, has offered safe passage to Hamas’s leadership and fighters out of Gaza. Where is the world? Where is the world, saying, ‘Yeah, do that! End this! Stop the suffering of people that you brought on!’”
The obvious answer is because Blinken himself has devoted most of his energies to pressuring and castigating Israel.
Perhaps Blinken’s interview was a signal that he will not go forward with the plan that his subordinates have developed to subject Israel to a Security Council resolution and to further criminalization it at The Hague. Perhaps it was nothing more than an effort to rebuild his ties to the anti-Israel camp as he leaves office. Time will tell.
In the meantime, and not knowing how Blinken will act, the only way to avoid what Doran referred to as a “January surprise,” and facilitate the speedy release of Liri Albag and the other 99 hostages, is for the incoming Trump administration to apply massive pressure on Britain and France to veto any such resolution in the Security Council and to threaten Slovenia and Algeria with sanction if they advance the resolution in question.
Liri Albag’s video, like others that Hamas has released in recent weeks, is a reminder (if one was necessary) of why Hamas must be eradicated. Blinken’s interview was proof that the Biden administration has been the single greatest obstacle to the hostages’ release and to Hamas’s eradication.
{Reposted from JNS}
