A group of families of Israeli hostages said Tuesday at a press conference in Tel Aviv, Israel, that their government should strive to achieve an agreement in which all 100 captives remaining in Gaza are freed, not just a few.
The press conference was held as speculation mounted about an imminent hostage-and-ceasefire deal. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas was reportedly summoned to Cairo, Egypt, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was rumored to be traveling to Cairo as well — until he showed up atop Mount Hermon in Syria.
Reporting by Reuters suggested that Netanyahu might still travel to Cairo to finalize a hostage deal as well.
The Times of Israel reported:
A group of former hostages whose loved ones are still held by terrorists in Gaza hold a press conference at Tel Aviv’s Hostages Square to call on the government to only sign a deal with Hamas that guarantees at the outset that all 100 remaining captives will be freed.
“I am here, a woman who returned from captivity,” says Ilana Gritzewsky, whose boyfriend, Matan Zangauker, is a hostage, addressing the country’s leaders. “I know what that hell feels like. You can’t abandon them for another single day. You can’t continue playing petty and cynical politics, as if their lives are just another item on your agenda. Make a deal, now. A comprehensive deal, without leaving anyone behind.”
…
“A partial deal isn’t a partial victory — it is a complete moral and ethical defeat that will leave Israeli society with a bleeding wound that will consume it from within,” says Meirav Tal, a former hostage, whose partner, Yair Yaakov, was murdered in Hamas’s October 7, 2023, onslaught. Yaakov’s body is still being held in Gaza.
Previous hostage deal proposals, advanced by the Biden-Harris administration, have imagined a staged process, in which a small number of hostages would be released at first, followed by more in subsequent stages — though there has never been any guarantee, even in U.S. proposals, that all of the hostages would be released by the end of the deal.
Two events appear to have made a hostage deal more likely. One is President-elect Donald Trump’s direct threat to Hamas that there would be “ALL HELL TO PAY” if all of the hostages were not released by his Inauguration. (Trump repeated that threat against Hamas at a press conference at his residence at Mar-a-Lago, Florida, on Monday.)
The other is the sudden disappearance of key Hamas allies, with the ceasefire in Lebanon taking Hezbollah out of the war, and the collapse of the Syrian regime meaning that Iran’s main conduit for weapons to the west had also disappeared.
Only the Houthis in Yemen, the Iran-backed militias in Iraq, and Iran itself are still theoretically available to help Hamas fight Israel — and Israel has dismantled Iran’s air defenses, as well as its remaining military assets in Syria.
Hope continued to mount throughout the week in Israel. On Monday, a “ribbon” similar to those worn by supporters of the hostages’ cause appeared in the sky.
Officials said it was due to an Israeli spy plane, not a political statement.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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