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TIMING is everything, especially in politics. Mistiming can be fatal, as three recent leaders, now out of power, have learned. In October 1999, PM Mian Nawaz Sharif decided to remove COAS Gen Musharraf, even while Musharraf was returning home from Sri Lanka. In June 2019, PM Imran Khan transferred the then head of ISI, Gen Asim Munir. Both prime ministers paid for their misjudgment.
On July 21, 2024, US president Joe Biden stepped aside in favour of his vice-president Kamala Harris, a few months before the elections. His selfish delay cost their Democratic party the presidency.
Americans may recall the 1980 presidential elections that lost Jimmy Carter the presidency. A year earlier, on Nov 4, 1979, Iranian students seized the US embassy in Tehran and detained 66 American diplomats and staff. Fourteen managed to escape. The remaining 52 were held hostage for 444 days.
Carter ordered two rescue missions, which failed. In September 1980, a US-friendly Iraq invaded Iran. Two months later, Carter contested the presidential election and suffered a landslide loss to Ronald Reagan. Immediately after Reagan was sworn into office, the Iranians obliged him by releasing the embassy hostages.
Palestinians have lost both their lives and land.
That scenario has been replayed 45 years later, this time with different actors. Donald Trump replaces Reagan, and Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas the hostage holders.
Over a year ago, on Oct 7, 2023, 250 hostages were captured by Hamas when it attacked Israel. The attack triggered Israel’s retaliatory military offensive which, over the next 15 months, killed over 47,500 Palestinians, injured more than 110,000, and destroyed everything above the ground in the Gaza Strip.
On Jan 15, 2025, five days before Trump’s swearing-in, it was announced that an agreement had been reached between Hamas and Israel. Hamas agreed to release 33 out of 98 hostages in the first phase. In exchange, Israel would release more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners. Not all the hostages were Israelis. Almost half were citizens from other countries: Thailand, Nepal, Philippines, the US, Russia, France, Germany, UK, Ireland and Argentina.
Over the period of their incarceration, these hostages were visited by the International Red Cross and other NGO teams. One report was bureaucratese at its best, or worst. Who but someone luxuriating in Geneva would describe the condition of the hostages in Gaza with this euphemism: they were “prone to immediate mortality”?
The unwise might be tempted to ask why Israel had not tried to rescue the hostages. It certainly had the capability. It had with precision targeted and then annihilated Hamas’s top leadership.
According to a recent BBC report, specific Hamas victims were: Yahya Sinwar (the architect of the Oct 7 attacks); Ismail Haniyeh who was killed during a visit to Tehran; Mohammed Deif, the head of Hamas’s military wing, the al-Qassam Brigades; Marwan Issa, the deputy commander of al-Qassam Brigades, killed in a tunnel beneath the Gaza Strip; and Mahmoud Zahar, who was injured when an Israeli plane dropped a bomb on his house in Gaza City in 2003.
Perhaps the most intriguing was the botched attempt in 1997 to kill Khaled Meshaal (one of the founders of Hamas). Under direct instructions from Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, Israel’s Mossad spy agency entered Jordan on forged passports and injected, KGB-style, a toxic substance into Meshaal. The BBC disclosed: “The late King Hussein of Jordan asked Israel’s PM for the antidote for the substance Meshaal was injected with. Facing pressure from then US President Bill Clinton, Mr Netanyahu provided the antidote.”
Given such murky depths in international politics, it is not inconceivable that Hamas kept the hostages in a place known to the Israelis and perhaps also the countries whose nationals had been abducted. That may explain why the impression was created that the hostages were primarily Israelis and therefore bargaining counters between Israel only and Hamas. Why did Hamas need to hold citizens of Thailand, Ireland, Argentina and the Philippines? Unless it was done at Israel’s behest.
An Israeli-British hostage released recently said that she and other hostages were kept at facilities run by UN’s agency for Palestinian refugees. Interestingly, the day after being sworn in, President Trump halted support for UNRWA. Israel proposes to ban it. A generation ago, during the peace talks in Shimla after the 1971 war over Bangladesh, Mrs Indira Gandhi offered Mr Z.A. Bhutto return of 5,000 square miles (approximately 13,000 square kilometres) of captured land, or 93,000 Pakistani PoWs & CUPCs. He opted for the land. He knew she could not hold the hostages indefinitely. Israel and the US gave the Palestinians no such choice. The Palestinians have lost both their lives and their land.
The writer is an author.
Published in Dawn, February 6th, 2025
