After Lebanon cease-fire, Israeli families hope for hostage deal
TEL AVIV - When President Joe Biden vowed that the cease-fire between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon this week would be followed by a renewed push for a truce in the Gaza Strip, Jonathan Dekel-Chen made a deliberate effort not to get his hopes up.
“I try to avoid the term ‘optimism,’” said Dekel-Chen, whose son, Sagui, and some 250 other Israelis were dragged by Hamas-led militants from Kibbutz Nir Oz into Gaza last October.
And yet Dekel-Chen and members of six other families of American hostages have met for marathon sessions with Biden administration representatives, including national security adviser Jake Sullivan, and with associates of President-elect Donald Trump. They are conveying the message they’ve repeated for more than 400 days: For their loved ones, held in brutal conditions in Gaza, each passing moment could mean death.
More than 100 people remain captive in Gaza; dozens are believed to still be alive.
The families are pinning tenuous hopes of seeing their people again on the prospect that the U.S. presidential transition period could finally bring an end to their ordeal.
“Clearly, Hamas and the Israeli government have no intention of ending this,” Dekel-Chen said. “So we are trying to mobilize both incoming and outgoing administrations, to make every possible effort to get them to agree.”
The American hostage families said they were “encouraged” by the Lebanon deal. In a statement, they said they planned to mark Thanksgiving with the symbol that has become achingly familiar: an empty chair at the dinner table.
Aviva Siegel, who was taken into Gaza last Oct. 7 and held for weeks, was disappointed that the Lebanon cease-fire agreement did not include a hostage release, as had been rumored. The deal came on the anniversary of her own release with 105 others. Siegel’s husband, Keith, an Israeli American, remains a captive in Gaza.
“The hostages, the elderly people like Keith who are sick, who are starving; the girls, who are being touched and beaten, we need them home,” she said. “Their coming back needs to be the first thing to happen in this region.”
The families have been buoyed by the election of Trump, whose victory was followed by reports that officials in Doha would expel Hamas from Qatar, but confused by what they see as a missed opportunity in the cease-fire deal.
“We finally had some sort of leverage in talking to Lebanon, which - unlike Hamas - is a proper country,” said Iris Weinstein Haggai. Her parents were killed on Oct. 7, but their bodies are still being held in Gaza. Dozens of her friends, including Shiri Bibas, a mother of two children under 5, remain captive.
“The hostages have become normalized, and even dehumanized, all across the world,” Weinstein Haggai said. “And if they don’t seize this opportunity - we just don’t know. They don’t have time.”
In Gaza, the Israeli military has dismantled Hamas battalions and killed the group’s leader and military chief, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Tuesday. Trump vowed during the campaign to “stop wars”; Netanyahu has rushed to help make that happen in Lebanon.
Netanyahu this month sent one of his most trusted ministers to meet with Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner at Mar-a-Lago to iron out details of the Lebanon cease-fire - saying it would be a Trump foreign policy victory even before he took office, The Washington Post reported - and catching the Biden administration up in a meeting immediately afterward.
Trump and his advisers have been mostly quiet about the Lebanon deal, leaving Biden, who has for more than a year pushed for a cease-fire in Gaza, to revive efforts toward a similar breakthrough there.
Some Israeli officials, too, are hoping to seize the momentum to get hostages released, according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she was not authorized to discuss it. In the weeks after Trump’s victory and the gradual withdrawal of Qatar as a negotiating partner representing Hamas, Israeli and Egyptian officials have been quietly conducting shuttle diplomacy to work out a Gaza cease-fire and hostage release.
“Nothing is on the table yet, but Israel is trying now hard to recover the relationship with Egypt, to get them to be the main negotiators and not Qatar,” she said. Officials hope to tell Hamas that Hezbollah, a key ally, is decimated, and unable to continue supporting them as they did a year ago.
“At the moment, they may try to get even a smaller deal … to get momentum” that could lead to a broader agreement, the person said. She said it was believed that the longer a deal takes, they less likely it is to succeed.
Egypt was planning to send a delegation to Israel “with the goal of making use of what happened with Hezbollah to make [another] cease-fire deal between Hamas and Israel,” according to a former Egyptian official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive matter. Delegates planned to propose the United States as a guarantor of the truce, a role it’s playing in Lebanon.
Egypt is proposing that Hamas release the hostages gradually, in contrast to Netanyahu’s demands that all be returned at once, the former official said. Egyptian President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi has asked Trump to pressure Netanyahu to agree.
Dekel-Chen views American pressure as crucial. He is concerned that Netanyahu’s far-right ministers are making plans to settle Gaza and forget about the Israelis still held there.
“It is clear that our government has other goals which don’t include saving the lives of the hostages, and are doubling and tripling down right now their push for a continuous war and a renaissance of Jewish settlement in Gaza,” Dekel-Chen said. “And so our request is that incoming Trump administration join forces with Biden’s people and, in real time, now, get a deal done, to force all parties to yes.”
Hamas said Wednesday it would “cooperate with any efforts” to end the war in Gaza, but repeated demands including the withdrawal of Israeli forces, the return of displaced Gazans, and a “real and complete” prisoner exchange deal. Hamas still wants to play a political role in Gaza, a condition that Israel and the United States have rejected.
But a negotiated settlement in Gaza is politically fraught for Netanyahu. He’s widely blamed for the failure to stop the Oct. 7 attack, is flailing in the polls and has depended on far-right partners to keep his coalition afloat.
Gilad Korngold, whose son Tal Shoham is still held hostage in Gaza, confronted National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir in the Knesset on Wednesday. Ben Gvir, who voted down the most recent cease-fire proposals in Gaza and was the sole cabinet minister to vote against the Lebanon deal, told Israeli television Tuesday that Israel needed “some patience” to finish the war in Gaza.
“We are living in hell for a year already, and in the north you agree to a deal and in the south you don’t? Why?” Korngold shouted furiously at Ben Gvir in a Knesset plenum. “This is the time. Hamas is weakened. Israel has nothing left to do in Gaza. Do a deal, like in Lebanon, and save the hostages.”
Einav Zangauker, whose son Matan is also a hostage, told Ben Gvir: “There are bodies of hostages, buried dozens of meters below ground, and you want to pave roads and erect outposts, and settle the Gaza Strip upon their blood.”
If Matan “is alive, if he survived,” she said, “who are you to prevent me from getting him home?”
- - -
Lior Soroka contributed from Tel Aviv and Heba Farouk Mahfouz contributed from Cairo.