TEL AVIV — After more than 15 months of war, the guns have finally fallen silent in Gaza. Thanks to a fragile ceasefire, a total of seven Israeli hostages have now been released. Romi Gonen, Doron Steinbrecher, Emily Damari, Karina Ariev, Daniella Gilboa, Naama Levy and Liri Albag are now home safe with their families, with more hostages set to be freed in the coming days and weeks. It should be a time for celebration. So why does this moment feel so hollow?
On the first day of the current truce between Israel and Hamas, Israel freed 90 Palestinian prisoners from its prisons, in exchange for three Israeli hostages. This past weekend, Israel freed 200 more. On its face, the agreement between Israel and Hamas makes little sense. Ever since Hamas launched its October 7 massacre, Israel and Hamas have been at war, with only a brief, week-long pause in the hostilities in November 2023, and it has ostensibly been asymmetric.
The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) include more than 150,000 active personnel and almost 500,000 reservists. It has stunning military technology, including state-of-the-art defence systems to protect Israeli civilians. In its latest global rankings, Global Firepower ranked Israel as a Top 15 military power.
In contrast, Hamas’s fighting force prior to the war was estimated at 30,000. Over the years, Hamas reportedly stockpiled advanced weaponry, constructed a complex and effective subterranean tunnel system and benefited from the tutelage of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Still, by just about every metric, there is no comparison: the IDF is stronger.
The IDF’s power was on full display during the current round of fighting. Media outlets around the world regularly shared pictures of Gazan neighbourhoods bombed to rubble. Palestinian authorities estimated the death toll to be in the tens of thousands. Accusations of genocide were levelled against the IDF — accusations that tend to imply that Israeli forces caused a great deal of death and destruction, and that the Israeli government intended to destroys Gazans as a group, in whole or in part.
Yet the events of the past two weeks are beginning to paint a picture of an Israeli loss. Videos of Hamas’s well-choreographed hostage handovers show large crowds of people held back by armed Hamas fighters in full military uniforms, which seems to demonstrate the continued survival of Hamas as a fighting force and its persistent control over the area. Former U.S. secretary of state Antony Blinken stated recently that Hamas has recruited so many new fighters, it has nearly replaced all those lost to Israeli strikes — a stunning revelation, if true.
Then there is the blatant inequality of the current agreement: almost 100 Palestinian prisoners last week were exchanged for just three Israeli hostages. Two hundred more were exchanged over the weekend for an additional four. Over the coming weeks, Israel is set to release almost 2,000 Palestinian prisoners, many of them convicted murderers, in exchange for just 33 hostages.
Until this week, Hamas refused to share with Israeli authorities what proportion of the 33 were still alive. That uncertainty for the families of Israeli hostages was a cruel continuation of the ideological warfare perpetrated by Hamas. Now we know that eight of the 33 are reportedly dead.
On Jan. 15, when Israel and Hamas finally agreed to a ceasefire deal, Hostages Square in Tel Aviv was deserted, with only a handful of Israelis singing quiet ballads and prayers. Now that the truce is in effect, the general feeling has been characterized by conflicting emotions: relief that more hostages are coming home, deep sadness for the hell they have endured and anxiety over the fate of those still held in Gaza.
Beyond that, there is anger that convicted murderers have to be set free in order to get the hostages back, fear that those same murderers will cost more lives in the long-run, dread that the Iranian regime and its proxies have reportedly already stepped up efforts to kidnap Israelis overseas and the loneliness that comes with knowing that so few non-Jewish people understand these lived experiences.
These realities on the ground drive home the point that in asymmetric warfare, the psychological battle can be the determining factor between victory and loss.
Some analysts are pointing out that Israeli operations against Hamas cannot be examined in a vacuum without also considering the war’s other fronts, including the decisive victory the IDF achieved over Hezbollah in Lebanon. This may be true, and it is also a significant achievement that Bashar Assad’s fall in Syria disrupted and weakened the Iranian regime. However, it does not look like, or feel like, a victory on Israeli streets today. At best, this round is probably best characterized as a draw.
National Post
Sarah Teich is an international human rights lawyer, a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, legal advisor to Secure Canada and co-founder and president of Human Rights Action Group.