The latest update from Israel by Dr. Binyamin Klempner who was our guest on The Yakking Show Podcast in episode 276. Older updates from Israel are available here.
So much has changed in the week since Binyamin wrote this update that I included my message to him today.
It is interesting how much has changed since you wrote that update.
Hezbollah defeated, Assad fled to Russia, the Syrian military weaponry totally destroyed by your airforce and ground forces, Druze villages petitoning to be administered by Israel and today, reports that Egypt is asking Israel for help. A noticeable silence from Iran.
The last two weeks must be among the most momentous in the Middle East’s history and significant in a wider context.
Apart from the usual idiots staging anti-Israel protests at universities and despicably, outside synagogues in the pathetically governed nanny states of Canada and Australia, opposition to Israel’s defending itself seems to have quietened down considerably since Syria started falling and people in the West suddenly woke up to the fact that Israel is the only country with the resolve, resources and capability to stop Syria from becoming a terrorist-governed state with a dangerous arsenal of weapons.
Perhaps the farcical videos of “victims of genocide” actors in Gaza getting off stretchers and walking normally on supposedly broken legs when they thought the cameras were turned off are helping liberal Westerners wake up.
Here is Binyamin’s update from the 4th of December 2024
There were only two checkpoints left right next to the Lebanese border. One of the military police officers manning the checkpoint did a little joyful jig when he saw me. I had made him coffee about six months earlier at a different checkpoint, a checkpoint that no longer exists. Except for this and that one other checkpoint, none of the checkpoints are still there. Man was he happy to see me. We reminisced. About days that used to be. Days that hold meaning for us. I made them coffee. Only coffee I made that day- and drove on.
Some time later I was standing on the observation deck of Mount Adir with a bunch of paratroopers still in the reserves. They were telling me about their two weeks in Lebanon. The Hezbollah operatives didn’t mind being killed, just so long as they could take some of our guys with them in an ambush. But our soldiers were fast to learn Hezbollah tactics, and to avoid them. The guys were tired. They wanted to go home. They wanted to go back to work. A couple hours later I met up with a couple more paratroopers. One guy was telling me about how depressed he is having just been informed by his university that he’ll need to repeat an entire year of studies.
The guy who was with him told me that while his marriage is still strong, most other guys who stuck out in their battalion over the past fourteen months have floundering marriages that they can barely go home to. He was talking about himself, but didn’t want to tell me that. So I gave him my number, told him I’m a marriage therapist and I expect to hear from all the guys in the battalion whose marriages are on the rocks. He then mentioned that October 7th their battalion had all one-hundred-twenty members. Half of them dropped out.
Now sixty guys were carrying the weight of the other sixty guys. He said the other sixty guys weren’t willing to sacrifice their marriages and families and educations and careers for their country, so they returned, and those willing to make the sacrifice are now being confronted with the enormity of the sacrifices they made. I told the guy to spread my number around. Then I took out some of the patches donated by my cousin Marc and in ceremonial fashion stuck those patches to their sleeves.
But for the most part it’s over.
Just today I saw this editorial in the Time of Israel:
Isolated Hamas faces collapsing negotiating stance after drastic Trump threat
Terror group pinned hopes of salvation on the Iranian axis and world pressure on Israel, but now has just a few weeks until an unpredictable and angry US president returns
By Lazar Berman
Earlier this week, two days after Hamas released a propaganda video showing American-Israeli hostage Edan Alexander pleading with Donald Trump to secure his release, the American president-elect typed out a message that was sure to make the terror group and its backers in Iran take notice.
“Everybody is talking about the hostages who are being held so violently, inhumanely, and against the will of the entire world, in the Middle East – but it’s all talk and no action!” Trump wrote Monday on his Truth Social platform, without mentioning Israel or the Palestinian terror group by name.
“Please let this TRUTH serve to represent that if the hostages are not released prior to January 20, 2025, the date that I proudly assume Office as President of the United States, there will be ALL HELL TO PAY in the Middle East, and for those in charge who perpetrated these atrocities against Humanity,” he continued.
The message was posted by a famously voluble leader, but it should not be underestimated.
It comes at the worst possible time for Hamas, and could be what is needed to finally break the terror group’s unwillingness to recognize the weakness of its position in hostage talks.
Sinwar’s three bets
For much of the duration of war that erupted on October 7, 2023, Hamas — under the guidance of the late Yahya Sinwar — believed its bargaining position was only improving with time. Once its leaders recognized they had withstood the height of Israel’s military offensive in early 2024, Hamas staked its hopes on three developments.
First, Sinwar and his senior aides hoped throughout that the expansion of the conflict with Hezbollah and Iran would force Israel to sue for a ceasefire in Gaza in order to avoid a multifront war that would exact too high a toll on its soldiers and home front.
Second, they also believed that international pressure — from the US and Western allies, the United Nations and bodies like the international courts in The Hague — would force Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to accept a hostage deal that would leave Hamas standing in Gaza, and in a position to rebuild both its grip on the territory and its military force.
“We have the Israelis right where we want them,” Sinwar told other Hamas leaders, according to a June report in The Wall Street Journal. The higher the civilian death toll in Gaza, the more pressure would be put on Israel, he said.
Government hostage point-man Gal Hirsch argued in a recent speech that there was a “direct and immediate connection between pressure on Israel and Hamas’s appetite for negotiations.”
“Hamas identifies every ‘daylight,’ every sliver of light, and whenever it identifies ideas like ‘we won’t give you ammunition,’ arms embargoes, removing reservations about the ICC [cases], this doesn’t help us to reach hostage deal,” Hirsch said at Reichman University.
As for the third factor, Sinwar, a close observer of Israeli politics, had certainly noticed the growing domestic anger at Netanyahu as the months passed. Protests by hostages’ families and their allies merged with anti-Netanyahu demonstrations, and a growing number of Israelis were calling for an end to the war without Hamas routed — if it meant the hostages would come home.
Shortly before his death in mid-October, Sinwar told Hamas’s leadership that a long war against Israel was beneficial. “The longer it lasts, the closer we get to liberation,” senior Hamas official Osama Hamdan recounted Sinwar saying.
Sinwar is now dead, but those making decisions in his place did not immediately seem willing to make any major concessions, either — at least not until recent developments knocked the pillars out from under Hamas’s position.
Tables turning
When Hezbollah began assaulting Israel to support Hamas in October 2023, it vowed to continue to do so as long as the war in Gaza continued. This past September, Jerusalem reached the limit of its patience and launched a massive offensive against the group. After being hammered by Israel via air, ground, and pager, the wounded terror militia last week threw in the towel without a ceasefire in Gaza, abandoning its previous position and leaving Hamas in the lurch.
And though Iran’s willingness to strike Israel directly with ballistic missiles twice in the past year was sure to raise Hamas’s hopes of salvation, Tehran has so far not made good on its promise to strike a third time. And with the Bashar Assad regime in Syria under new military pressure from rebels, the Islamic Republic appears to have its hands full trying to avoid losing another key member of its axis.
Following Trump’s victory in the US elections, international pressure on Israel is likely to wane, with Netanyahu expecting a more reliable veto in the United Nations Security Council, a quicker flow of key weapons and intense pressure on the International Criminal Court as it goes after the Israeli leadership.
Domestic opposition to Netanyahu isn’t going to push him to a deal either. Firing defense minister Yoav Gallant removed the chief internal advocate of an urgent deal, and bringing in Gideon Sa’ar’s New Hope party stabilized the coalition.
Perhaps, over time, the protest movement’s pressure on Netanyahu, with its carefully chosen slogan of “Bring them home now!” could have gained enough traction in the public.
But Hamas no longer has time on its side.
The pressure is on
In a little over six weeks, Trump’s deadline will arrive. His slogan, which puts the onus squarely on Hamas, seems to be “Release them now!”
It’s not clear what Trump might do to back up his threat, but his disdain for norms makes his ultimatum credible in the region. He could make Iran pay for Hamas’s intransigence through sanctions, strikes on oil and gas sites, or even attacks on Revolutionary Guards forces and Shia militias outside Iran.
Trump is unlikely to order strikes against Hamas itself in Gaza, where Israel is handling the fighting. However, he could see to it that Hamas leaders abroad have no comfortable home in the region, and could provide Israel with the means to target them as they flee Turkey and other countries they’ve called home in recent years.
And, of course, he could give Israel the green light to carry out new, stepped-up raids in Gaza, with less concern for humanitarian aid reaching civilians.
Netanyahu on Tuesday unsurprisingly hailed Trump’s “very strong statement,” noting that the US president-elect had made it clear “that there is one party responsible for this situation — and that is Hamas. Hamas must release the hostages.” Trump, said an appreciative Netanyahu, “put the emphasis in the right place — on Hamas, and not on the Israeli government, as is customary in some places.”
Apparent cracks in Hamas’s resolve have already been showing. Last week, The New York Times reported that the group was expressing increased flexibility in its demands.
Citing two people familiar with the terror group’s thinking, the report said leaders of the terror group have been discussing allowing Israel to maintain a temporary presence in the Philadelphi Corridor, the strategic border area between Egypt and Gaza where Netanyahu has insisted Israel must retain control.
According to the New York Times report, “reality started to sink in” for Hamas after Sinwar’s death in October, as it became clear that Iran was not looking to enter into direct conflict with Israel, and that Hezbollah was being hit hard by the IDF.
But even in Hamas’s new, perilous reality, the fundamental gulf separating Israel’s red lines from Hamas’s core demands remains. The terror group continues to insist that in any hostage-release deal, the IDF will end up fully withdrawing from Gaza, and Hamas leaders and operatives will remain in the Strip, poised to slowly rebuild themselves over time. Israel sees that outcome as a loss, letting the perpetrators of October 7 survive and threaten it once more.
Now, with Trump making his desires crystal clear, Hamas has a decision to make.
It could use the next few weeks to get the best deal it can, allowing Israel to retain a much-reduced troop presence in Gaza, which it hopes will disappear in time under domestic or international pressure, when other countries increasingly see IDF forces in Gaza as part of an occupation that stands in the way of the Strip’s reconstruction.
Or it can continue to hold on to the hostages and the hope that Netanyahu will eventually break, while it faces the unpredictable commander-in-chief of the world’s most powerful military — a man who famously doesn’t like being refused.
It seems to me that either way you look at it, the war is winding down. In the north, at least for now, it’s over. I drove along an empty highway through areas that used to be full of soldiers for whom I would stop and make coffee and talk. I visited places I’ve wanted to visit since the beginning of the war. Keshet Cave. Yifatch National Park. The summit of Mount Adir. But on the highways there were no soldiers, no Humvees. Just civilian traffic.
I look forward. And I also look backward. I look forward and see the soldiers I gave my number to, letting him know my services as a counselor are available to him and to his men. I look backwards and see meaningful days gone by, meaningful days that inform, that give storied instruction, to days ahead.
Thank you for joining me on this journey.
All the best,
Binyamin Klempner
Thank you for your latest update from Israel , Binyamin, and we look forward to your next update after the overthrow of Assad in Syria and the radically changed situation in your neighbouring countries.