Trump Takes Victory Lap as Israeli Hostages Freed
All 20 living hostages have been released and the bodies of others are slowly being returned.
WaPo (“Trump declares ‘dawn of a new Middle East,’ celebrating release of all living hostages“):
President Donald Trump touted the “dawn of a new Middle East” as he addressed Israel’s parliament to celebrate the return of the remaining living hostages from captivity in Gaza as part of a U.S.-backed ceasefire plan. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called Trump “the greatest friend that the state of Israel has ever had in the White House,” as he welcomed Trump to the gathering.
The 20 living hostages were released in two groups, seven first and then 13, and have arrived back in Israel. Israeli authorities have also begun releasing hundreds of Palestinian detainees and prisoners, the vast majority of them expected to be Gaza residents who were swept up by the Israeli military over the past two years but never charged with crimes.
Palestinians have voiced fears that once the hostages — Hamas’s only leverage — have been released, the Israeli military could return to attacking the enclave. Trump has offered his personal guarantee that Israel would not do so.
All the major news outlets are in live-blog mode. WaPo provides these bullets further down:
- President Donald Trump said in his speech before Israel’s parliament that the ceasefire deal was “a very exciting time for Israel and for the entire Middle East, because all across the Middle East, the forces of chaos, terror and ruin that have plagued the region for decades now stand weakened, isolated and totally defeated.”
- Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu thanked Trump for what he called his “indispensable help,” praising him as “the greatest friend that the state of Israel has ever had in the White House.”
- All 20 living hostages have been released and returned to Israel. They were released in two groups.
- The bodies of 28 hostages are also due to be released Monday, but it is not clear how many will be handed over; Hamas has said it would be unable to find some of them by the 72-hour deadline because of the destruction in Gaza. Israel has said an international mechanism will enter Gaza to search for those who have not been found.
- Israel has also begun to free Palestinian prisoners and detainees. Under the deal, 250 people serving life sentences and some 1,700 Gaza residents held without charge since Oct. 7, 2023, are expected to be released.
All in all, a historic day. Time will tell, of course, how long this peace lasts. But Netanyahu will be hard-pressed to justify a resumption of mass hostilities absent major provocation.
Would you call his most extreme coalition “partners” threaten to leave the government when/if Israel makes concessions they deem unacceptable, a major provocation?
Also, Bibi might figure any internal opposition to his war will go away once there are no hostages remaining in Gaza. He might even be right about it.
The West Bank: “Hold my beer.”
Netanyahu will do whatever he wants. Justification not needed.
Israel’s clear military superiority has won out. Gaza has been leveled and many inhabitants killed. I don’t know how many, and we can’t believe the claims by either side. I’m sure that if Hamas had clear military superiority, they would have leveled large portions of Israel with no concern for Israeli casualties. None of my comments are intended to justify the killing of non-combatant civilians of either side.
We will now be treated to triumphant chest pounding by Trump and Netanyahu, but what happens next? A hardening of the apartheid system in Israel seems most likely to me. Will Palestinian resistance evaporate or will it rebuild subsurface until the next explosion? The intifadas of twenty five and fifteen years ago burned out. Suicide bombings are mostly in the past. International pressure in the form of keeping Israel out of various events such as Eurovision song competition is fading; the cool guy progressives will find some other cause du jour. Sometimes there are no satisfactory outcomes.
Right now, today, Mossad is tracking Hamas targets. Hamas soldiers killed Israeli children – Israel will never stop hunting them down. Methods may vary, of course. On the other side anyone who thinks Hamas is going to stick to the terms of a deal is smoking better weed than I’m getting.
Today, fewer people are getting killed. Fewer people who really didn’t deserve it are getting killed, and that’s a good thing.
I still wonder about the thought process that started this all off – murders and kidnappings. What did the people that engineered that and executed it think they would gain by it? Have they, in fact, reached their goals by doing it?
To me, it’s unfathomable.
@Jay L. Gischer:
They clearly did not achieve their goal unless they wanted to stage a murder-suicide. I imagine that when all you’ve got in your playbook is: murder civilians, you rationalize the goal. You tell yourself stupid shit like, ‘I’m fulfilling my destiny,’ or, ‘as long as it hurts our enemies,’ or, ‘I must rebuild the empire.’ That last one was Russia.
It is an absolute good to have the hostages freed.
@Slugger:
It probably depends crucially on whether a governance and policing system can be established in Gaza that keeps Hamas marginalised.
Given Hamas is already attempting to re-establish political/military ascendany in Gaza.
Whether any considerable military power is willing to risk its forces in Gaza, and soon at that, is a major issue.
Perhaps something will emerge from the Sharm el Shiekh talks; or than again, perhaps not.
And also on whether Netayahu is inclined to accomodate the expansionist settlement policies of the far-right re the West Bank as some sort of consolation prize for the curbing of their ambitions re Gaza?
Smotrich and Ben-Gvir were threatening to walk over the deal just a few days ago.
Though they are not in a position to block the deal in the Knesset, given Likud and YA, plus others have the numbers, Netanyahu would dearly love to have their votes by some means in the neasr future to protect his own position
A general election must be held no later than Octber 2026.
Netanyahu may well get a polling lift from the deal; but that’s likely to be wasting asset.
His position within Likud seems safer than it was.
But he can’t long put off a full scale inquiry into the security failures re the October 2023 attack, which is unlikely to do him any favours.
If Netanyahu decides it’s politically essential to him to indulge the settlers, then any hope of a stabilised Palestinian Authority being able to prevail over Hamas will likely come to naught.
@Jay L. Gischer:
Hamas doctrine has always had two key strands:
– The necessity and legitimacy of “armed resistance” at all costs.
– The artificiality of “colonial imperialist settler Israel”, which will, in their view, inevitably collapse if stressed hard enough.
They are continuations of a strand of Arab nationalist and Islamic thought that have been ongoing since 1948; the stance of “rejectionism”.
Despite plentiful evidence they are a route to nothing but ruination.
The collapse of pan-Arab “rejectionism” after the Egypt-Isreal deal, and the decision of most other Arab states that such performative stances were pointless (apart from Saddam Hussein, for reasons of his own calcualtion) led to the rise of the Iranian/Islamist “alliance of defiance”.
And now that is a busted flush as well.
But as far as Hamas is concerned: they can only be a hammer, looking for nails that will magically rescue their cause.
@Michael Reynolds:
You could say the same thing about bin Laden, but the damage he did reverberates to this day.
Decadent western democracies are faltering, in large part because of the domestic police state that was created in response to 9/11 expanding outwards.
I am very reluctant to describe any carefully planned and orchestrated action as a murder-suicide. Seems a lot more likely that I’m not seeing the motives, rather than that the motives make no sense.
Like right wing militia groups in the US that want to trigger a race war that will usher in a White Christian Nationalist regime. Look at America and ask whether Timothy McVeigh was entirely unsuccessful, and whether his motives were just murder (and getting away). His methods were far less effective than just claiming that Portland is a war zone where shops are burnt down so regularly that they don’t bother installing windows when they rebuild, but his motive was the same. And it laid the groundwork.
Sure, there are moments like Jonestown, where it is just murder-suicide for murder-suicide’s sake, but they are quite rare.
Per WaPo
How do you think this will affect things with the next Democratic administration?
Hamas leadership doesn’t give a shit about people in Gaza. Or their fighters. If you remove the negative consequences there from the calculations, it looks like they wanted to provoke a response that would be so horrible that it would drive a wedge between Israel and its allies in the west.
Uphill battle when the west is dealing with a resurgence of fascism, granted. And a lot more of Hamas leadership got a lot more dead than they were expecting.
But 10 years from now, if the US emerges from authoritarian rule, Israel’s defense is greatly weakened.
@Michael Reynolds:
I wonder how Hamas and the PA might have reacted had the IDF killed even one Palestinian child…
@Gustopher:
I think most motivations are retconned. I’m a pretty logic-driven guy but there are things I’ve done for which I could offer a plausible explanation, but it would be bullshit. I occasionally work on a memoir, and as a story guy I could weave all the strands of my life together to make it appear planned, but I don’t want to lie, and the truth is way more random. People do things on impulse, out of emotion, or because they can’t think of anything else to do. It’s not different for politicians or terrorists. The imperative is always to do something, so people do. . . something. . . and come up with a rationalization which is not the same thing as a motivation.
IOW, I don’t think Hamas had a coherent thought, they were not capable of strategic thinking, they were stuck on tactics and did not think any further ahead than, ‘how do we do this?’ Their motivations would have been plural and trivial, things like, ‘kids think I’m useless so I’d better do something,’ and ‘this will impress a girl,’ and ‘this will be epic!’ and, ‘who knows, maybe something good will come of it.’
@Kathy: I guess we will never know.
@Michael Reynolds: It’s the large scale organization that requires at least some long term thinking.
Dylann Roof would much more wobbly and inconsistent motivations than Timothy McVeigh — McVeigh had to convince his fellow co-conspirators, and gather materials, etc. for months.
I have no doubt that some of the individual fighters in Hamas were doing it because they were upset that their left foot was weirdly shaped, or to impress a girl or whatever. But the leadership had a clear plan, a range of expected outcomes and likely notions of a plan for how to react to those.
Remember those quaint days when US presidents believed partisan politics should stop at the border?
Stay classy, Sir.