Why the Israeli Hostages Face Grim Prospects

As horror stories of the slaughter committed by Hamas militants against Israeli civilians continue to emerge, the country’s emergency government is weighing the possibility of a ground invasion in Gaza. The death toll from the attack in Israel has surpassed 1,300. More than 1,400 people have died in Israeli retaliatory airstrikes on Gaza.

Israel’s path ahead is further complicated by an unprecedented hostage situation, in which Hamas abducted more than 150 hostages—including children, women, and older people—claiming to hold them in tunnels across the Gaza Strip.

To better understand the Israeli government’s deliberations and options, Foreign Policy spoke with counterterrorism expert Boaz Ganor, who has years of experience studying terrorist organizations and advising governments on extortion and hostage negotiations. Ganor is a professor and also the president of Israel’s Reichman University.

This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Foreign Policy: How unprecedented is this type of hostage situation for Israel?

Boaz Ganor: It’s unprecedented not just for Israel but for the world. Although similar operations have been conducted by ISIS in Syria and Iraq, this is something that hasn’t been seen in other places around the world by other terrorist organizations. It reflects a certain level of inhumanity and cruelty that even for me, a counterterrorism expert in the business for approximately 40 years, is astonishing.

They butchered babies, beheaded others. It’s inconceivable.

A word of warning to the world: Unfortunately, when it comes to terrorism, anytime Israel faces a new type of terrorism, the rest of the world is later challenged by the same practices. We have seen it with hijackings, kidnappings, with suicide attacks, and now I can almost guarantee that, unfortunately, we will see this atrocity copied by other terrorists in other places in the world in the future.

FP: Has Israel ever dealt with a situation like this, in which children or women were taken hostage?

BG: Israel saw kids and mothers and elderly people hijacked, not kidnapped, in the 1960s and ’70s. But we have never seen terrorists behaving in such a shameful, inhumane way toward kids, women, and elderly people.

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FP: If the conflict continues to drag on, what happens? How does it change Israel’s calculation in regard to the hostages?

BG: There are two types of extortion attacks when terrorists hold hostages. One type of extortion is when terrorists use a barricade situation, using a building, vehicle, train, or an airplane, in order to hold the people as hostages within a facility. Another type of extortion attack is kidnapping. In that case, they are taking the hostages to an unknown location.

There are huge differences between those two types of attacks, because when we talk about the hostage barricade situation, we know where the hostages are being held. While it’s very complicated to conduct a rescue operation, you still have the intelligence needed to know where they are in order to start planning a rescue operation. In a kidnapping attack, you don’t have this advantage. Usually, you don’t know where the hostages are. They are taken to a secret place, and therefore, you cannot plan or execute a rescue operation.

Israel faces a mass kidnapping attack. It’s not one or two or five people. We are talking about somewhere between 100 and 200 hostages. They are not being held in one place. They have been spread out in different places. Islamic Jihad is claiming to hold 30 of them, and Hamas is holding others, and you have other small jihadi organizations that might have their own Israeli hostages. This means that the ability to conduct a simultaneous rescue operation in many parts of Gaza Strip is close to zero percent success.

FP: What considerations are the decision-makers in Israel taking into account in this type of situation? What are the main ethical and practical dilemmas they are facing?

BG: In a typical hostage crisis dilemma, before deciding whether to conduct a rescue operation, decision-makers calculate the risk that terrorists will harm the hostages or that the rescue team will be hurt during the operation—as long as accurate intelligence, manpower, and an experienced rescue team exist.

In the current situation, an additional consideration will be the purpose and goals set by decision-makers for a military operation in Gaza. The new emergency government is deciding what to do in response. The rules of the game have changed. This is not just a military operation—this is war. This is the worst war that Israel has ever faced because 1,300 people were massacred, a number that will likely rise. The vast majority are civilians.

Israel will likely engage in much harsher bombing attacks and some kind of ground operation in Gaza. Those types of activities would not support a fast secure deal of exchanging our hostages for the convicted terrorists that they want to free from Israeli jails.

It’s a zero-sum game. Either Israel decides to say, “We are ready to have some kind of a cease-fire to reach a fast and fair kind of exchange,” or Israel decides to retaliate much more and teach them a lesson.

FP: How will the government factor the element of uncertainty—the tunnels and how densely populated Gaza is—into their decisions?

BG: The uncertainty, the density, and the underground city built in Gaza, and the amount of hostages spread in different parts of Gaza, take a rescue operation out of the equation.

It’s still possible to conduct a full-scale military operation and use intelligence aiming to free hostages there, but the possibility of doing that simultaneously and freeing the hostages unharmed is close to zero.

FP: Due to all of the complexities you mentioned, it appears that a ground invasion is the most likely scenario.

BG: I would expect to see a military operation in large parts of Gaza changing into rescue operations here and there based on new intelligence on the whereabouts of the hostages.

The consideration of the Israeli hostages will become a minor consideration. The success of the military operation and the guarding of the lives of the Israeli soldiers would probably be the first priority.

FP: How does the involvement of Hezbollah in the north impact the hostage situation?

BG: If Hezbollah decided to light up the northern border, we would see tens of thousands of rockets being launched toward Israel, and the Israeli hostages in Gaza would be a minor calculus. We saw 3,000 rockets being launched last Saturday from Gaza. If Hezbollah got involved, it would be 10,000 or 20,000 rockets a day from Lebanon. The number of Hezbollah’s Radwan forces is much bigger than what occurred on the southern border, and therefore, the nature of the war and the damage that would be inflicted on Israel would be much higher than in the last week. Because Hezbollah is entrenched and embedded within the Lebanese civilian society, the harm that would occur to the Lebanese people would be unprecedented as well, and that should be taken into consideration by all sides.

FP: There are reports that Qatar, Egypt, and Turkey have offered to mediate. What is the likelihood of that?

BG: The states mentioned are not the solution. I exclude Egypt from that, but Qatar and Turkey are big supporters of Hamas, and I haven’t heard them standing against this savage attack. They are incapable of mediating between Israel and Hamas because they took a wrong normative stance. What happened in Israel is a crime against humanity, and any state that supports these terrorists should be sanctioned and condemned.

Egypt is a different actor, and it can play a role of mediation between Israel and Hamas, and it mediates on a daily basis. Other actors such as the United Nations and the Red Cross could also play a mediation role.

FP: What is the official government policy on hostage negotiation?

BG: Israel never had this kind of atrocity, and therefore there is no policy to refer to. I can refer to the policy of holding one, two, three, or five hostages. The official policy in hostage situations was that if there was an option for a rescue operation, it would always be preferred, regardless of the price to the lives of the hostages and the lives of the soldiers. It’s always the preferred solution. If there was no possibility of a rescue operation, then Israel would be ready to get into a serious negotiation for exchange of prisoners, convicted prisoners, and return of the hostages and saving their lives.

FP: How much will public pressure in Israel influence how the government moves forward?

BG: In the past, it had a huge influence on the government’s decision. The best example is Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier who was kidnapped into Gaza by Hamas [in 2006].

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly declared in every interview he gave that he would never surrender to demands of extortion by terrorists. He gave over the largest number of convicted terrorists with blood on their hands compared with any other Israeli leader in the past. This was an outcome of direct pressure by the families and the public at large on the government in Israel.

Here, the situation is different, because we are in a war situation that has an existential impact on Israel. If Israel is unable to make clear to Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran that this was foolish and counterproductive, we would see them attacking Israel again in a short period of time. Those considerations are top of mind for Israeli decision makers, much more than any public pressure right now.