The man who called timing of hostage deal 7 months early – analysis

National Security Council chief Tzachi Hanegbi made a stunning prediction on May 29, 2024: that the war would need to continue another seven months. Given that the end of the war was expected to coincide with a hostage deal, Hanegbi basically nailed the role of prophet in this case.

Was he a prophet or did he already know something that outsiders could only guess at?

While few observers knew what the military logic was for seven months at the time, it later became apparent that the plan was to hope for a Trump presidential election win, which might lead to a more favorable global handling of the Palestinian issue, even if Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu might need to make concessions at that later date.

Netanyahu even made allusions to the timing of the presidential election influencing aspects of war decision-making and a possible hostage deal in an interview he did recently with the Wall Street Journal (though he did not specifically tie the hope for a Trump win to the timing of ending the war.)

Since May 29, 192 IDF soldiers and some dozens of hostages have died.

Hostage deal if Israel would leave the Philadelphi Corridor

A number of defense sources told the Jerusalem Post around that time and even more in July (by that time all of Hamas’s 24 organized battalions had been taken apart) that a deal, eerily similar to the one likely to be announced soon, could be cut if only Israel would be willing to leave the Philadelphi Corridor after Phase 1 of the deal and allow most Gazans to return to northern Gaza crossing through the Netzarim Corridor.

If there are differences between the deal now and then, it could be that Netanyahu may secure the release of 33 hostages in Phase 1 now, and back then, he might have only secured closer to 18 in Phase 1.

If Israel retains a serious security perimeter beyond the end of the hostage deal, that may also be a difference.

And, of course, diplomatic sources have said that Hamas simply was not ready to finalize the deal back in May or July and was lying to Israel at the time about how many hostages were alive or dead to try to manipulate Israel into receiving fewer live hostages upfront.  

If there had been no deal because of Hamas, then there would not have been much to analyze.

The interesting question will be that when certain negotiators who are not bound to Netanyahu by loyalty eventually release their full narratives of the negotiations, will it turn out that a deal could have been cut before the 192 IDF deaths and the dozens of hostages died?

If that happens, Netanyahu’s narrative will need to shift to the idea that he wanted the deal closer to when Trump entered office in order to have a more favorable post-Gaza war framework and a better Saudi normalization framework.

Historians will then debate whether a post-war Gaza run by the Palestinian Authority along with the UAE, Egypt, and the CIA taking over in early or mid-2024 would have been better or worse than Netanyahu’s as yet unclear plans for post-war Gaza, which emphasizes keeping the PA out.

Of course, there are also some other major things Israel and Netanyahu achieved since July 2024: killing Hamas leaders Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Deif, and Ismail Haniyeh, clobbering Hezbollah and killing its leader Hassan Nasrallah, defanging aspects of Iran’s arsenal, and indirectly assisting to topple the Assad regime in Syria – as a non-exhaustive list.

It will be hard, if not impossible, to objectively analyze what might have been seven months ago versus what transpired.

But we do know for sure that Hanegbi was confident enough to make a precise and public prediction on a seemingly random day in May.