Hamas fears this type of arrangement would allow Israel to resume operations in Gaza after a temporary pause, and continue until Hamas is fully destroyed—a situation Hamas wants to avoid at all costs.
By Yaakov Lappin, JNS
Hamas’s refusal to accept a recent Israeli partial deal offer for a ceasefire and the release of some 10 Israeli hostages is a calculated attempt to ensure its long-term survival by forcing Israel to end the war on the terror group’s terms, former Israeli defense officials told JNS in recent days.
At the heart of this approach lies an Islamist-jihadist ideological commitment to Israel’s destruction, and a tactical imperative to maintain power in Gaza at all costs, they argued.
Shalom Arbel, a former senior member of the Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet) who served from 1988 to 2013 in roles involving human intelligence recruitment and operations and before that as a major in the IDF reserves in Lebanon, Gaza and Judea and Samaria, said, “What I think drives them is their agenda. It’s the Hamas strategy, which at its core is the strategy of the Muslim Brotherhood.”
Arbel added, “At the end of the day, their supreme goal is the destruction of the State of Israel. They want to seize this land, which they consider Islamic Waqf [inalienably Islamic] land, which is the Land of Israel, and they think they must return it to Muslim hands. They believe they must do everything possible to fight Israel, to weaken Israel, to bleed Israel.”
According to Arbel, partial agreements do not serve Hamas’s strategic interest.
“Partial deals mean that Israel gets hostages back -that’s Israel’s so-called soft underbelly. Israel receives hostages, releases [Palestinian] prisoners, who are not such a valuable asset from Israel’s point of view, since they can be rearrested,” he said.
Hamas fears this type of arrangement would allow Israel to resume operations in Gaza after a temporary pause, and continue until Hamas is fully destroyed—a situation Hamas wants to avoid at all costs.
Instead, Hamas now insists on a comprehensive deal, Arbel explained, because it believes only such a framework, guaranteed by international actors, can secure its survival.
“They want a full deal in which Israel is pushed to imagine an end to the war. Note how this receives a strong response in Israeli society… and where the war’s end is meaningful, with international guarantees that Israel can’t break the arrangement,” he said.
The voices in Israel calling for the government to adopt this framework, and claiming that Israel can resume fighting soon after it receives its hostages, are oversimplifying the challenge, Arbal argued.
“Hamas is not stupid. They are very cunning and deceptive. That’s part of their agenda and directive. To receive serious guarantees that are significant and ensure their survival is their goal,” he cautioned.
Hamas views the hostages as leverage to secure its own survival, Arbel argued.
Hamas’s war on Israel would renew in a number of years after it regroups, while the other arenas such as Judea and Samaria would see a massive boost for Hamas’s status if this scenario came to pass, he added.
The catastrophic costs to Gaza from the war are not important to Hamas, he said, since all that matters to it is the overall jihadist goal.
“Those killed are promised a martyr’s death. Those who remain in Gaza and who continue [the fight] in Judea and Samaria and other arenas would, in Hamas’s view, get to ‘liberate’ the Land of Israel.”
“Hamas treats the hostages entirely as merchandise,” said Arbel, noting that Hamas has in the past withheld even basic information about the hostages’ conditions.
“Now they release such information ‘for free’ – because they are trying to manipulate Israeli public opinion.”
Lt. Col. (ret.) Jonathan D. Halevi, a senior researcher of the Middle East and radical Islam at the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs and co-founder of the Orient Research Group Ltd., noted that contrary to public perception, “The phrase ‘everyone for everyone’ never existed. That’s a misrepresentation. For Hamas, it’s everyone in return for everything.”
Halevi detailed Hamas’s core demands: complete IDF withdrawal from Gaza, including the security perimeter, the lifting of the security blockade, international guarantees against renewed Israeli military action, and large-scale reconstruction of the Strip—including the rebuilding of Hamas’s infrastructure.
Halevi warned that this approach is designed to manufacture a narrative of jihadist victory, which would reverberate across the Middle East. “If there’s an ethos of Hamas victory, that has forward-looking consequences—not just locally,” he said,
He explained that Hamas is stalling while leveraging international pressure campaigns to increase internal Israeli dissent and influence public opinion.
“Their emphasis is to cause internal pressure to force Netanyahu to accept Hamas’s terms. That’s their declared strategy—through families of hostages, through protests. The messages, as seen from the outside, are the same on both sides,” he said, adding that it seems that Hamas is copying some anti-Netanyahu messages from among Israeli protesters and trying to co-opt them, as part of its pressure campaign.
“The Israeli view is very narrow. It focuses on seeing the Israel-Gaza problem. This is inaccurate. Hamas could decide [as part of a future deal] to stop releasing hostages because of Israeli activities at Al-Aqsa [the Temple Mount in Jerusalem] or the Cave of the Patriarchs [in Hebron], for example,” he warned.
As part of this pressure campaign, Halevi said, based on Hamas documents that he has recently translated, it emerged that the late Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar had interpreted the protests in Israel against the government as constituting “a green light that the [former American Biden] administration wanted to bring down Netanyahu.”
The IDF conducted extensive overnight airstrikes this week across the Gaza Strip, focusing on western Gaza City, Khan Yunis (southern Gaza), and Rafah (southern Gaza).
Specific IAF strikes targeted at least three concentrations of heavy engineering vehicles used by Hamas for terror infrastructure. The IDF spokesperson stated these strikes targeted Hamas infrastructure.
Meanwhile, an analysis published on April 21 at the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security by Col. (res.) Prof. Gabi Siboni, who serves as a consultant to the IDF, and Brig. Gen. (res.) Erez Winner, a former head of planning for IDF Southern Command, warned that Hamas does not fear the suffering of Gaza’s civilian population and views the October 7, 2023, massacre as a model for future operations.
“Hamas is already working on the next Oct. 7,” they said. “It views the attack as a great victory and is unmoved by the price paid by it or the Gaza population.”
They noted that Hamas rejected both Israel’s proposal and the American Witkoff Plan, which included the return of approximately half the remaining 59 hostages, living and dead, in exchange for an extension of the ceasefire.
The authors called for full Israeli military control over the Gaza Strip, stating, “The key to achieving the war’s objectives lies in the complete destruction of Hamas’s military and governmental presence in Gaza.”
They warned that this is essential not only to ensure security in the south but to prevent Hamas from framing the current campaign as a victory that would inspire further radicalization in Judea and Samaria.
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