PM Netanyahu in Jerusalem in February 2025.Credit: Maayan Toaf/GPO

The proposal submitted by U.S. presidential envoy Steve Witkoff calls for a temporary cease-fire lasting through the Ramadan and Passover holidays. Half the hostages would be freed on the first day of its implementation, and all the rest would be freed later – if an agreement on a permanent cease-fire is reached. But this proposal was born due to Netanyahu’s refusal to proceed to the second stage of the original deal for the hostages’ return.

According to that agreement, which Israel signed, the return of the remaining hostages depends on ending the war and a full withdrawal of the Israel Defense Forces from Gaza. But Netanyahu isn’t willing to declare the war over or announce a pullout from Gaza, for a reason that has nothing to do with the hostages or even the needs of the war. Nor is it related to Hamas’ contemptible behavior during implementation of the deal’s first stage – returning a Palestinian woman’s body instead of that of Shiri Bibas and staging release ceremonies that involved humiliating the hostages and dangerously exposing them to mobs.

The reason for Netanyahu’s refusal is his concern for keeping his government alive, which depends on the far right. Consequently, he welcomed this new half-a-plan, which will obscure his previous commitments and reshuffle the negotiations’ deck, in order to buy more time – time that will extend his government’s life but shorten the hostages’ lives. This is also why he halted humanitarian aid to Gaza, which is a violation of the original agreement.

The hostages’ families are justly furious. They understand that Netanyahu is preoccupied with domestic politics and that his top priority is Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, not the hostages and their families. The families also understand that halting humanitarian aid to Gaza is meant to appease the far right, in the hope that the Trump administration will swallow the spin that the reason for this move is Hamas’ rejection of the Witkoff proposal.

“Netanyahu carried out a targeted assassination of the agreement,” Einav Zangauker screamed this weekend. “The crisis that now exists in the negotiations is a deliberate crisis that Netanyahu created and engineered. It’s possible to bring them all back. There’s a plan that could be carried out tomorrow morning – ending the war and bringing them all home in one go.” She is right. Netanyahu simply decided not to start negotiations over a permanent cease-fire.

The negotiations over the second stage, which were supposed to start on day 16 of the first stage, haven’t taken place at all. With the first stage now over, 59 hostages remain in Gaza, of whom 24 are still alive. The way to bring them home isn’t to extend the first stage, but to move on to the second stage – that is, to end the war and withdraw from Gaza, as the agreement states, instead of starving everyone in Gaza, including the hostages.

Haaretz Editorial