At 7.40pm on Monday 6 May, Hamas issued a statement saying that it had accepted a ceasefire proposal offered by Qatari and Egyptian mediators. Spontaneous demonstrations, led by the relatives of Israelis who were kidnapped on 7 October, broke out in Tel Aviv and elsewhere in Israel, calling for the government to accept the deal. At 10pm on the same night came the first reports from Rafah indicating that the long awaited and feared Israeli attack had begun.
In a nutshell, this sequence of events reflects the contradictory situation in which Israel finds itself: on the one hand, growing voices saying that the only way to bring back the hostages is to end the war, a demand that was almost a taboo until just a few weeks ago; and on the other, the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, reluctant to accept any end to the war, claiming that the only way to bring back the hostages is through military pressure, in Rafah and elsewhere.
The change of mood is also evident from the polls. In an opinion poll published on Channel 11, a public broadcaster, a week before the invasion of Rafah, 47% of those asked supported an end to the war in Gaza in return for the release of the Israeli hostages, while only 32% were against. Even after the Israeli war cabinet unanimously rejected Hamas’s offer – the mainstream media described Hamas’s acceptance of the deal as fraudulent – 41% of those surveyed wanted Israel to accept it, while 44% were against it.
These figures are interesting because supporting an end to the war is hardly considered a legitimate position within Israel. Very few politicians have made this call, and in the media such voices are rare. During the first months of the war, there was no need for polls to know that the Jewish-Israeli public hugely supported “crushing Hamas” and believed that only military pressure would bring back the hostages.
Two main elements have contributed to this change. The first is the realisation that, despite the huge military force that Israel has exercised in Gaza, and despite the huge death toll of more than 35,000 Palestinians and the massive destruction of urban space all over the Gaza Strip, Hamas is not going to raise the white flag, continues to fight and has regained effective civil control over many of the areas from which Israel has practically withdrawn.
Only last week, five Israeli soldiers were killed in the Zeitoun neighbourhood in southern Gaza City, an area over which the Israeli army had declared victory in November 2023. While most Israelis still support “crushing” Hamas, the goal seems less and less achievable.
The second is that the hostages issue has become even more significant. After almost 220 days of war, the Israeli army has managed to liberate alive only three hostages out of the 240 kidnapped by Hamas (104 further hostages were released through a deal; five more have been released unilaterally by Hamas). The idea that “only military pressure” will release the hostages, repeated again and again by politicians, generals and commentators, looks more and more like empty words.
The hostages’ relatives have played a decisive role in this change in public opinion. While in the first months of the war, the demonstrations they held in a piazza in Tel Aviv were marked mainly by grief and mourning, in recent months this grief has turned into anger and a clear preference for a ceasefire deal over the endless and seemingly futile efforts to defeat Hamas.
As these families were fighting a “legitimate” cause – freeing their loved ones – it was easier for them to demand what some other Israelis could not bring themselves to say: the only way to release the hostages is through a deal with Hamas, which will include the end of the war. Einav Zangauker, a professed Likud supporter, whose son Matan, a soldier, was kidnapped, became an emblematic figure in this fight. “Release the hostages in a deal and stop the war,” she has said time and again.
The demonstrations organised by relatives of the remaining 132 hostages (not all the families participate, yet those who do are very vocal) have become an open challenge to Netanyahu’s government’s refusal to end the war. The more radical left, which at the beginning of the war was hesitant to go to the streets for justified fear of police reprisals, and whose marches are still limited in numbers, joined the families’ demonstrations; its messages against the war, and for a political solution, are welcomed with sympathy by the tens of thousands who attend these marches. It would not be exaggerating to define them as anti-war protests.
Netanyahu well understands this. The official reason given for the invasion of Rafah is to destroy the last four Hamas battalions and to pressure it into accepting Israel’s terms for the release of the hostages. But many Israelis simply do not buy this explanation. Many believe that Netanyahu does not want to release the hostages and end the war – because an end to the war would mean an end of his government.
One may suspect, therefore, that Netanyahu’s real aim in invading Rafah is to stop this shift in Israeli public opinion vis-a-vis the end of the war. When the guns roar, the prime minister may think, protests are usually silent, especially in a militaristic society such as Israel. Yet Netanyahu could find that it’s not only Palestinians resisting his plans; many Israelis may not accept them either.
Meron Rapoport is an Israeli journalist who writes for +972 magazine and is an editor at Local Call
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