Hamas has deliberately used hostages as leverage since its attack on Israel almost two years ago, and that strategy has allowed the conflict to continue, Walid Phares, a foreign policy adviser to candidate Donald Trump in 2016, said on Newsmax on Sunday.
“Unfortunately, that’s the conclusion of most analysts at this point,” Phares told Newsmax’s “Sunday Report.”
“Hamas, from week one, knew what they were doing,” he said. “They captured hundreds of individuals, Israeli citizens and foreigners as well, precisely to use them to stretch as much as they could in time, and they did. We are in 2025. We are in the summer of 2025, and still there are hostages there.”
Phares added that U.S. policy under former President Joe Biden placed pressure on Israel, not Hamas.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has insisted on the need to remind the world of the “barbarism” of Oct. 7 and has vowed to continue operations in Gaza until Hamas is eliminated.
“It looks like, understanding what the prime minister of Israel is saying, Israel is going to go and free the rest of Gaza from Hamas. But now the big question mark, what is the actual reality for the hostages?” Phares said. “Will Hamas use them again to get more time? Their fate will be very bad.”
Turning to Turkey’s announcement that it would sever economic ties with Israel and close its airspace, Phares cautioned against taking the move at face value.
“Turkey’s AKP party government is Islamist,” he said. “At the end of the day, they have said many times, including the president of Turkey, Mr. [Recep] Erdogan, that they consider Israel as the aggressor.”
However, “for people who know Turkey, the size of the economic and financial interests between, not the state of Turkey, but the civil society and the businesses in Turkey, they have a deep relationship with Israel, so I would read that statement with caution,” Phares said.
He added that Turkey may be playing both sides.
“On the one hand, the leadership of Turkey wants to make that statement for their own consumption, for the consumption of all Islamists in the region,” Phares said. “But on the other hand, there are economic realities on the ground. It could be that they’re going to go half-half. On the one hand, they put pressure. On the other hand, there is the reality that even Turkey cannot change.”
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