Former Israeli hostage negotiator says Israel missed two windows for deal

A former Israeli negotiator said on Saturday that Israel missed two opportunities last year to secure a ceasefire in Gaza and hasten hostage releases, prompting a swift rebuttal from the premier’s office.

“In my view, we missed two opportunities to sign an agreement… in March and July” last year, said Brig. Gen. (res.) Oren Setter, who resigned from the Israeli negotiating team in October, after serving as the deputy to the IDF’s point man in the negotiations for a deal, Maj. Gen. (res.) Nitzan Alon.

“We did not do everything we could to bring them back as quickly as possible,” Setter asserted in remarks aired by Channel 12 on Saturday, countering frequent claims to the contrary from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Asked if he was surprised by the emaciated, frail state of hostages Eli Sharabi, Or Levy and Ohad Ben Ami when they were released from captivity on February 8, Setter said that there was a difference between knowing that the hostages were being held in difficult conditions and “seeing it with your own eyes.”

But, he said, Israeli leaders knew that the hostages were “being held in very difficult conditions,” and cabinet members were aware that they were chained, starved, and physically and emotionally harmed.

“The matters were presented in [cabinet meetings and smaller consultations with the prime minister] clearly,” he said.

Regarding missed opportunities for a deal, Setter alleged that there had been two “windows” — one in March and one in July last year.

In early December 2023, at the conclusion of a weeklong truce agreement, negotiators began looking ahead to future agreements when the IDF launched its ground operation in Khan Younis in southern Gaza, Setter recalled. The pressure of the Khan Younis operation initially appeared to be working, Setter said, and Hamas said it was open to discussing a multi-phased hostage deal and ceasefire agreement.

However, he said that at that stage, the issue of the so-called Netzarim Corridor — which Israel withdrew from last week for the first time since the early days of the war — was critical to Hamas, and the terror group was demanding a full Israeli withdrawal from the route, which bisects the Strip south of Gaza City.

By the time Israeli negotiators had convinced the defense establishment and political echelon that there was no other way to secure the deal but to withdraw from the Netzarim Corridor, it was February 2024, and the impact of the Khan Younis operation was wearing off, Setter explained, and Hamas adopted a hardened position, slamming shut the window of opportunity that could have led to a prolonged ceasefire deal, similar to the one currently in place, almost a full year earlier.

The second missed opportunity in July revolved around the Philadelphi Corridor on the Gaza-Egypt border, he said.

That month, Netanyahu had presented the continued IDF deployment in the Philadelphi Corridor as a new demand in the hostage negotiations, arguing it was a necessity for Israel’s security.

Critics accused the premier of intentionally introducing a demand that would sabotage the deal, which at the time appeared to be closer to being achieved than it had been in months.

Asked whether he believed the argument over the Gaza-Egypt border route had stemmed from political considerations, Setter said that he “didn’t think the Philadelphi Corridor was so important that it was right to miss the window of opportunity because of it. But other people… thought differently.”

He said that ultimately, the window of opportunity for a deal was once again shuttered by disagreements over the future of the key Gaza route.

He acknowledged, however, that the outline on the table had been far from perfect but stood by his belief that it should have nevertheless been approved.

“Time was so precious that it was the right time to get to Doha or Cairo and sit down to negotiate the remaining gaps between the versions and not to resort to a stricter interpretation” of the agreement, he said.

“But we didn’t do that. The mediators said, ‘There’s no way to move forward right now.'”

“On August 30, we returned on a flight to Israel in the middle of the night with the feeling that we were missing this window, and we woke up the next morning, and started hearing about the discovery of six hostages who were murdered a few days earlier in Rafah,” he said.

Setter was referring to the murder of hostages Hersh Goldberg-Polin, 23, Eden Yerushalmi, 24, Ori Danino, 25, Alex Lobanov, 32, Carmel Gat, 40, and Almog Sarusi, 27.

“You say ‘Here’s the price [of missing the window].’ It’s very very tangible, and very painful,” he recounted.

After Setter’s interview with Channel 12 aired on Saturday evening, the Prime Minister’s Office responded with a statement alleging that “senior officials on the negotiating team say that Setter is lying” and that he has repeatedly leaked details from meetings in an effort to harm Netanyahu’s reputation.

His leaks, said the PMO, “have damaged the negotiations, endangered our hostages, and echoed Hamas’s false propaganda,” and are a criminal offense.

“As all senior US administration officials have testified time and again, Hamas has refused to negotiate for months and was the only factor that constituted an obstacle to the deal,” claimed the statement.

The PMO denied that a deal with Hamas could have been reached earlier.

Netanyahu’s office insisted that the terror group previously agreed to release only 12-14 living hostages in the first phase, as well as insisting on a full IDF withdrawal from Gaza and an end to the war. It also said that Setter and other negotiators told Netanyahu that it would be impossible to reach a deal if he presented tougher demands.

“If the prime minister had not insisted, at least half of the live abductees would not have been released in phase one,” claimed the PMO.

Setter said, as several other officials have in recent weeks, that the framework of the current deal is largely unchanged from the outline that was proposed, with Israel’s endorsement, in May 2024.

Hamas and Israel are currently implementing the first 42-day phase of the ceasefire, and negotiations have yet to begin for the second phase, despite having been expected to start almost two weeks ago — in an apparent violation of the deal’s terms.

Setter clarified that he wanted to “speak about facts” and argued that the deaths of hostages in captivity and “unnecessary suffering” could have been avoided, while still placing primary responsibility for last year’s negotiation deadlock on Hamas.

Since the current hostage-ceasefire deal came into effect on January 19, 19 Israeli hostages and five Thai nationals have been released. Fourteen more Israeli hostages, six of whom are believed to be alive, are to be released in the final two weeks of the first 42-day phase of the ceasefire.

The second phase is expected to cover the release of the remaining hostages and include discussions on a more permanent end to the war.

Seventy of the 251 hostages abducted by Hamas on October 7 remain in Gaza, including the bodies of at least 35 confirmed dead by the IDF.

The terror group freed 105 civilians during a weeklong truce in late November 2023, and four hostages were released before that. Eight hostages have been rescued by troops alive, and the bodies of 40 hostages have also been recovered, including three mistakenly killed by the Israeli military as they tried to escape their captors.

Hamas is also holding two Israeli civilians who entered the Strip in 2014 and 2015, as well as the body of an IDF soldier who was killed in 2014. The body of another IDF soldier, also killed in 2014, was recovered from Gaza in January.

Agencies contributed to this report.