The Palestinian Hamas terrorist organization balked at the second release of Israeli hostages on Saturday, delaying the transfer for several hours while complaining about alleged Israeli violations of the terms of the agreement.
Update: The Israeli military has said that if Hamas does not hand over the second group of hostages by midnight local time (5 p.m. ET), the entire deal is off and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) will resume attacking Hamas targets in Gaza (via Ynet).
According to sources in the Arabic media, including Al-Jazeera, the second group of hostages, mostly seized from Kibbutz Be’eri, were transferred to the Red Cross. The group was to have consisted of 13 or 14 hostages, the second part of the overall group of 50 to be released over the course of a four-day pause in fighting.
But conflicting reports soon emerged that Hamas was refusing to let the hostages go.
Two reasons were cited: first, that Israel had failed to provide humanitarian aid to the northern Gaza Strip, even though it had done so; second, that Israel had failed to release convicted Palestinian terrorists from its prisons in precisely the order that Hamas had demanded.
The effect of the delay has been further emotional trauma for the families of the hostages, who had been informed in advance about which individuals — women, children, and the elderly — were to have been released. In addition, the entire Israeli public, watching the drama unfold on television after the conclusion of the Jewish Sabbath, has been riding an emotional roller coaster.
Critics suggested that Hamas’s delay was a tactic designed to inflict maximum pain on the families of the hostages and on the Israeli public in general, and that the delay showed the risks of negotiating with a terror organization that did not respect the laws of war.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
