While President Donald Trump has expressed confidence that Hamas will free about 20 hostages seized in the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, Ido Aharoni, a former Israeli consul general in New York, warned in a Newsmax interview Tuesday that expectations must be tempered.
“I don’t think that we can talk about peace with Hamas,” Aharoni, now the chair of the America-Israel Friendship League and a professor at Touro University, told Newsmax’s “Wake Up America Early.”
“Compromise is not even a word in their vocabulary, so we have to be cautiously optimistic and prepare for the worst,” he said.
The challenge lies in Gaza’s fractured landscape, where hostages and bodies are being held not by a single authority but by competing groups, said Aharoni, who served as consul general from 2010 to 2016.
“You’re not dealing with a centralized entity, [as] the hostages and the dead bodies are being held by clans and families and gangs,” Aharoni said.
“While we have a pretty solid idea as to their exact location, we still have to overcome the big hurdle of them making a decision that it’s time to end Hamas rule in Gaza,” he added.
That reality, he added, underscores the consequences of Hamas’ decision to launch war against Israel two years ago.
“You imposed war on the most sophisticated army in the Middle East. You imposed war on the most robust economy in the Middle East. And there’s going to be a consequence,” Aharoni said.
Reflecting on the Oct. 7 massacre, Aharoni described a “trauma on two levels” for Israel: the loss of 1,200 people, hundreds of hostages, and thousands injured, and the shock of the world’s reaction even before Israel responded militarily.
“The most important thing is the feeling of helplessness that people felt,” he said. “Israel was defeated militarily for at least 24 hours.”
He also pointed to signs of division inside Gaza, where some militia groups are distancing themselves from Hamas.
“The picture is one of decentralized rule of Gaza today, a rule of gangs and warlords,” Aharoni said.
Hamas “is not about a better Palestinian future,” and “some people are getting fed up,” he added.
“Hamas is a death cult, a jihadist Islamist death cult, and some people are breaking off Hamas because they just failed to deliver,” said Aharoni.
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