We don’t know if President Trump’s ultimatum of Saturday noon for Hamas to release all the hostages will hold. We also don’t know what kind of “hell” will break out if Hamas doesn’t release them.
What we do know is that the man who’s made a career out of buying time and keeping his options opened—Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu— has been confronted with an unsavory deadline.
So, instead of discussing the next phase of a laborious three-stage ceasefire deal that was already teetering on the edge– and has led to humiliating scenes of Israeli hostages being paraded in front of cheering mobs—Bibi’s security cabinet initially joined Trump’s ultimatum. As JPost reported today, Defense Minister Israel Katz warned that if Hamas does not release the Israeli hostages by Saturday, all hell will break loose, “exactly as US President Donald Trump promised.”
Now, there are rumblings that Bibi and his team are trying to revive the ceasefire deal that will buy Bibi some time, but that’s far from certain.
Even with a tough ultimatum, though, my concern is that it may be 19 months too late.
The time to issue ultimatums about the hostages was immediately after the worst attack in Israel’s history, when Hamas, in addition to murdering 1200 souls, took hundreds more captive. In a region where any sign of weakness can be a death sentence, Israel never looked weaker than on Oct. 7, 2023.
Yes, Bibi’s prompt declaration of war against Hamas was a sign of strength, but separating that war from the release of all the hostages was a sign of weakness. It gave Israel’s enemy all the leverage it needed.
We can see the fallout today, when Hamas is toying with Israel knowing it holds most of the cards, going as far as to declare “victory” even after an extraordinary military effort by Israel to decimate the terror group. Agreeing to a three-phase deal with hostages released in “dribs and drabs” only reinforced Hamas’s leverage.
From Bibi’s standpoint, as long as he kept the focus on “total victory” while giving lip service to the hostages, he could continue to buy time and keep his far-right coalition partners on his side. It helped that the desire to smash Hamas had major public support in Israel.
But so did the desire to see the hostages released.
Bibi tried linking the two by arguing that the more military pressure on Hamas, the more likely they would bend on the hostages. But whether or not that was true, the point is that it didn’t commit Bibi to anything. It was nebulous.
That’s why he didn’t mind caving to White House pressure and finally agreed to a messy ceasefire deal. While some hostages were released, the deal was so full of ambiguities it allowed Bibi to still keep his options opened. He never saw a Trumpian ultimatum train coming.
If Trump holds firm on his Saturday High Noon announcement, he will have blown up all ambiguities. Now it would be all the hostages or nothing. Trump is treating Hamas not as some political pawn on a chess board but as the cruel and evil terrorist force that it is. To street fighters like Trump, the ultimate tough guy move is to issue ultimatums.
But to a political operator like Bibi, the ultimate tough guy move after the Oct. 7 massacre and capture of hostages was an open-ended war. That’s why he’s trying to bring back the ceasefire deal– it would keep his options opened. The alternative of confronting a hard deadline on Saturday that may force him to restart a difficult and complicated war is out of his political comfort zone.
In any case, his good buddy at the White House has shown him an old-school way to fight monsters who murder, torture and humiliate your people: You threaten them with a date.
If the ultimatum holds, we can only hope that for the sake of the hostages, and for the sake of smashing the monsters, it won’t be too little too late.
