Dozens of Israeli Hostages in Gaza Present Dilemma for Netanyahu After Vowing to Reduce Strip to ‘Rubble’

The shock capture of dozens of Israelis by Palestinian militants has created a complex conundrum for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, as it considers how to respond to the devastating Hamas attack without endangering the lives of the hostages.

Figures from Israeli officials put the total number of hostages at around 150, according to reports, meaning that there are no easy choices for Israel as Netanyahu vowed to reduce the Gaza Strip "to rubble" after the Saturday attack.

Those captured include soldiers, elderly women, children, as well as entire families, mostly from small Israeli border towns.

Amid continued fighting, Israel has mobilized 300,000 reservists and imposed what its defense minister, Yoav Gallant, has said will be a “complete siege” of the Gaza Strip, the narrow sliver of land that is ruled by Hamas, and is home to more than 2 million people who have been living in already dire humanitarian conditions for more than a decade and a half.

And reports in the Israeli press indicate that the government could continue to carry out attacks in the Gaza Strip, even at the risk of harming hostages unless there is accurate information about their location.

But what happens next is still hard to gauge, as Israeli society at large reels from the shock of the unprecedented hostage crisis.

As the Israeli newspaper Haaretz put it in an editorial Monday, underlining the continuing horror of the Hamas assault as the hostages remain in the hands of the militants, “the clearer the picture becomes and the more the dimensions of the catastrophe fall into focus, the more the pain, mourning and anger will presumably intensify, accompanied by a justified public demand that the government work to bring the captives home.”

“The state, the government and the man who heads it all have a duty to do everything in their power to bring all the captives back to Israel alive,” the paper said.

In 2006, Hamas’ capture of a young Israeli soldier named Gilad Shalit plunged Israel into a national crisis, triggering a heavy bombardment of the Gaza Strip.

It took several years for Shalit to be freed in 2011—and that too only after complicated negotiations brokered by Egypt that ultimately led Israel to release over 1,000 Palestinian prisoners.

This time, the picture is far more complex, with more than a hundred Israelis now in Hamas’ hands.

“It will limit the directions and areas that the IDF can be active,” Michael Milstein, a former head of the Palestinian department in Israeli military intelligence, told the Associated Press, referring to the hostage situation. “It will make things much more complicated.”

Hamas has already indicated that it wants all Palestinian prisoners in Israel to be released, with a senior leader of the militant group telling the Al Jazeera broadcast network over the weekend: “Our detainees in (Israeli) prisons, their freedom is looming large. What we have in our hands will release all our prisoners. The longer fighting continues, the higher the number of prisoners will become.”

Reports Monday morning indicated that there might already be some movement on trying to engineer a swap, with the Reuters news agency saying that the Persian Gulf emirate of Qatar was negotiating for the release of women and children hostages taken by Hamas.

Yet at the same time, Netanyahu faces pressure from many quarters to reply militarily to the Hamas attack, with Axios reporting the Israeli leader had told U.S. President Joe Biden that Israel had no choice to unleash a massive ground offensive in Gaza.

As the Israeli journalist and commentator Amos Harel, writing in Haaretz, put it late on Sunday night, given the scale of the militant attack and with the hostages in Hamas’ hands, “Israel is left with a hard nut to crack.”