Netanyahu: We Will Go Into Rafah and Defeat Hamas

Today, at least, Hamas and Benjamin Netanyahu agreed on one point — further negotiations are pointless. Hamas started off the day by announcing it would suspend talks on the hostages until Israel sent more aid to northern Gaza:

Hamas has suspended all Gaza ceasefire and hostage deal negotiations until humanitarian aid is brought into the northern part of the Strip, Al Jazeera reported on Saturday citing a leading source in the terror organization.

“Negotiations cannot be held while hunger is eating away at the Palestinian people,” the Hamas source told Al Jazeera.

Netanyahu responded by calling Hamas’ demands “delusional” again, and offered to return to talks if Hamas got more realistic about their position. The delusional part isn’t the aid, which has been an element of previous pauses and hostages-for-prisoners swaps, but the demands of Israeli withdrawal from Gaza as a precondition to negotiations. Until Hamas realizes that the war Hamas started on October 7 will be fought to the finish, Netanyahu has argued, there’s not much point in talking. 

Even if Hamas refuses to admit it, their intercessors seem to have figured it out. The Qataris have announced that “humanitarian” issues have become an obstacle to talks, and that the prospects of negotiations are “not promising”:

Humanitarian issues are the sticking point in the talks for a hostage deal which have not been promising in the last days, Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed Thani told the Munich Security Conference on Saturday.

“We still see some difficulties on the humanitarian part of these negotiations,” Thani said.

He described how the talks which his country and Egypt have been mediating had been progressing but then hit a snag in the last days. 

“We made some good progress in the last few weeks in the negotiations,” Thani said, but in the last days, the situation has “not been promising.”.

It’s “not promising” because Hamas still believes that they can control the outcome through the use of hostaging. Over the past seventeen years, that has proven to be a successful strategy, but the Israelis have learned that lesson — even if they’re not going to explicitly say so. After October 7, Israel now knows that it cannot offer any concessions that lead to either peace or security in anything other than the most short-term sense. They have to destroy Hamas, and even more importantly have to utterly discredit Hamas, to have any hope of survival. 

That means “total victory,” Netanyahu declared today, and that also means that Rafah’s time is rapidly approaching:

The premier asserts that “total victory” over the Gaza-ruling Hamas will send a message to other adversaries of Israel.

The Hamas leadership is on the run, and running out of places to hide. “The day is near” when the Hamas leaders will have nowhere left to escape, he says. “It’s only a matter of time.”

Netanyahu says he told US President Joe Biden that Israel will fight until “total victory — and yes that includes action in Rafah.” The IDF operation in Gaza’s southernmost city, he stresses, however, will come “obviously” only after civilians have an opportunity “to evacuate to safe areas.”

“Those who want to prevent us from operating in Rafah are essentially telling us: lose the war. I won’t let that happen,” he vows. “We won’t capitulate to any pressure.”

This followed up on Netanyahu’s proposal to Hamas yesterday, which was that the IDF would spare Rafah — if Hamas turned over all the hostages and left. Presumably, the answer to that offer was no, or it was ignored entirely. But it does remind us that the “humanitarian” issues are the responsibility of the party that started the war and has fought it while embedding in civilian population centers and facilities. If they want an end to the war they started, they can offer a formal capitulation and submission to the victorious party — just like Germany and Japan did in 1945. 

Hamas won’t do that, of course. So it’s up to the Gazans who put Hamas in charge to decide which they prefer: being the battleground for Hamas’ war, or getting rid of Hamas themselves and capitulating to the IDF. The clock is ticking.