Let’s unpack the essence of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu‘s utterances at Monday’s disastrous press conference. In a nutshell, he told the Israeli public, he told the anguished families of the still surviving hostages held captive by Hamas in Gaza and the grieving families of the murdered ones, he told President Joe Biden, he told Diaspora Jewry, he told Hamas, he told the world that he never intended to make any deal to rescue any of the hostages, that he will never make such a deal, and that his narcissistic, egocentric intention is to continue waging war in Gaza, perhaps forever.
That’s the gist of his belligerent and bellicose comments. He made clear that everything he ever said to the contrary to Biden, to Vice President Kamala Harris, to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, to French President Emmanuel Macron, to anyone, was a sham, a subterfuge, a delaying tactic, an outright lie.
Israel’s war goals, Netanyahu declared defiantly, were “to destroy Hamas, to bring back all of our hostages, to ensure that Gaza will no longer present a threat to Israel, and to safely return the residents of the northern border,” adding that “three of those war goals go through one place: the Philadelphi Corridor,” a narrow 14 kilometer-long (8.7 miles) stretch along the Egyptian-Gaza border, which, he contended, “is Hamas’s pipeline for oxygen and rearmament.”
An Israel protester carries a poster reading in Hebrew “Benjamin Sinwar” at a mass demonstration condemning Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his handling of the hostages being held by Hamas in Gaza, on Sept. 1, in Tel Aviv, Israel.
David Silverman/Getty Images
His insistence on the Philadelphi Corridor, which the IDF only took control of in May, as the centerpiece of his strategy to scuttle any deal for any type of ceasefire that would rescue any of the hostages is of relatively recent vintage.
As Yair Lapid, a leader of the opposition in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, succinctly put it: “Israel evacuated the Philadelphi Corridor 19 years ago, and Netanyahu voted in favor. Both in the government and in the Knesset. Netanyahu was prime minister for 15 years. It did not occur to him to recapture the Philadelphi Corridor. The war began on Oct. 7. Until May 20 . . . he did not bother to send the IDF to the Philadelphi Corridor.”
It was only in July, after months and months of stringing Biden, Blinken, the families of the hostages, and his own negotiating team along, that he had an epiphany of biblical proportions and suddenly took note of the Philadelphi Corridor.
This epiphany came in the form of an ultimatum from the mouth of Orit Strock, his hardline settlements and national projects minister, who hails from Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s far-right, ultranationalist Religious Zionism party. This is the same Smotrich, incidentally, who said more recently that “it might be justified and moral” to “cause two million civilians [in Gaza] to die of hunger.”
In any event, on July 16, Strock threw Netanyahu an unexpected lifeline by threatening in no uncertain terms that if the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) were to leave the Philadelphi Corridor and the Netzarim Corridor that neatly splits Gaza into two, “we will not be in the government, we are dismantling the government.” Lest there be any doubt in anyone’s mind, especially in Netanyahu’s, she emphasized that these were not idle musings on her part but that on the contrary, her party was “pressuring within the government, in the strongest way a party can pressure.”
Hearing Strock’s words, Netanyahu must have been as euphoric as Moses was when the sea parted for him. Here at last was a way for him to get out of having to make a deal. For he must have figured—accurately as it turns out—that he could use the Philadelphi Corridor to blow up the delicate negotiations that had been imposed on him not just by Biden and the international community but by his own military and intelligence chiefs and by the Israeli public at large.
Biden, Blinken, the Egyptian and Qatari negotiators, and his own Israeli negotiating team had worked feverishly to find a solution that Netanyahu was never, not in a million years, going to accept. And when his own negotiators assured him that they did not consider a physical IDF presence in the Philadelphi Corridor to be essential to Israel’s security needs, Netanyahu denounced them as weak.
Echoing former President Donald Trump‘s by now notorious claim in his 2016 acceptance of the Republican nomination for president that “Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it,” Netanyahu went around telling folks, according to a widely circulated Israeli television report, that “I’m on my own, facing the entire security establishment and the negotiating chiefs. They are showing weakness and just looking for ways to capitulate, while I’m insisting on the interests of the State of Israel and am not prepared to concede to demands that would harm security.”
Netanyahu’s arrogance and hubris are breathtaking. They are also profoundly, inexorably tragic because they cost the lives of the six hostages—Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Eden Yerushalmi, Ori Danino, Alex Lubnov, Carmel Gat, and Almog Sarusi—whose murdered bodies the IDF recovered over the weekend.
Lest there be any doubt in anyone’s mind, these six hostages were brutally shot by Hamas terrorist killers but it was Netanyahu and his security cabinet, with the sole exception of Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, who signed their death warrant and effectively gave Hamas license to pull the triggers by voting this past Friday to back Netanyahu’s insistence on a continued, perhaps permanent, IDF military presence in the Philadelphi Corridor.
It gets worse. Harrowingly, excruciatingly worse. We now know that the highly respected Mossad director David Barnea, one of the key members of Israel’s negotiating team, assured the Qatari prime minister that the IDF would leave the Philadelphi Corridor in the second stage of the proposed new agreement, under which Hersh, Eden, Ori, Alex, Carmel, and Almog might well have lived. Only Netanyahu once again pulled the rug out from under his own negotiators, thereby sealing the hostages’ fate.
According to a leaked transcript of the security cabinet meeting, Gallant, a retired major general and former head of the IDF’s Southern Command, told his fellow ministers in a heated exchange that “the significance” of their decision “is that Hamas won’t agree to it, so there won’t be an agreement and there won’t be any hostages released,” to which Netanyahu callously replied, “This is the decision.”
Gallant’s words proved to be prophetic. Hersh, Eden, Ori, Alex, Carmel, and Almog, who were alive last week, have now been executed by Hamas. “The fact that we prioritize the Philadelphi Corridor at the cost of the lives of the hostages,” Gallant told his fellow ministers on Sunday, “is a moral disgrace.”
It is Benjamin Netanyahu who is a moral disgrace.
The heart-wrenching tragedy is that now we all know what many of us have known for months: the rescue of the hostages is not and has never been Netanyahu’s priority. Neither is Israel’s security, since he cavalierly disregards those Israeli military and intelligence experts who know far more—and care far more—about Israel’s security needs than their prime minister. All Netanyahu cares about, all he has ever cared about, is staying in power and staying out of jail.
“The issue of the corridor is not Netanyahu’s concern, but, rather, the Ben-Gvir-Smotrich Corridor,” noted Lapid, referring to the extremist Internal Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and the aforesaid Smotrich who literally hold Netanyahu’s political fate and political survival in their hands. Along the same lines, a senior minister from Netanyahu’s own Likud Party, speaking anonymously, of course, told the Haaretz newspaper that “It’s unpleasant to admit, but Netanyahu will push for a deal only when the streets are burning. Right now, he fears Ben-Gvir and Smotrich more than he fears the families of the hostages.”
It would appear that any hope for the surviving hostages is illusory as long as Netanyahu remains prime minister. Their fate and Israel’s fate are in the hands of the hundreds of thousands of Israeli demonstrators who clamor with increasing intensity for his ouster from that position. In the words of the Jewish Addir Hu (Mighty is He) prayer recited at the Passover Seder, may it happen speedily and in our days.
Menachem Z. Rosensaft is adjunct professor of law at Cornell Law School and lecturer-in-law at Columbia Law School. He is the author of the forthcoming Burning Psalms: Confronting Adonai after Auschwitz (Ben Yehuda Press, 2025).
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
