Gershon Baskin
To negotiate with Hamas, Gershon Baskin had to push down his anger and fear of the group that had killed a member of his family to secure the release of Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier held captive for five years.
The veteran hostage negotiator has been attempting to get in touch once again — this time on behalf of the families held captive in Gaza. But for the past three weeks, Hamas has not been answering his messages.
“Hamas wasn’t willing to talk to the families directly,” Baskin said, although they would tell him how certain hostages were and publish signs-of-life videos at his request. “If I do get an answer, do I tell his wife? What if the answer is that he’s dead? There’s the dilemma.”
Baskin had been communicating with Hamas in unofficial backchannel talks before the ceasefire pact was announced on Wednesday. He met negotiators in Doha soon after the October killing of Yahya Sinwar, the mastermind behind the October 7 attacks. The deal is meant to bring an end to the longest and deadliest war in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but Baskin thinks it could — and should — have been done much earlier.
He credits Steve Witkoff, Trump’s envoy, for swaying Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, saying he
“stuck it out, he was amazing, he did what a mediator needed to do — to stay in the room until there’s a deal”.
However, the three negotiators acting on behalf of Israel, Baskin believes, “failed the integrity test”.
His long history with Hamas has a personal story that began with the abduction, torture and murder of his wife’s first cousin, Sasson Nuriel, in the West Bank in 2005.
Months after Nuriel was found dead in the street, killed by Hamas after a botched Israeli rescue attempt, Baskin had a chance meeting with the group. Since then, he has been trying to save lives and change Arab misconceptions of Jews by finding common ground.
“So I’ve had these philosophical discussions with Hamas people,” he said. “We talk about family and dreams and life and children and what we like to do, discussions about religion and God.”
He had an 18-year friendship with the senior Hamas member Ghazi Hamad but cut off contact after he voiced support for the October 7 massacre.
Ideologically, he and Hamas “were very far apart”, something that was apparent at the negotiating table when discussing the uneven ratio for exchanging prisoners and hostages, as high as 1,000 Palestinians to one Israeli.
“There are dead bodies and soldiers and different categories for each,” Baskin said, “including a category known as the VIPS, the Palestinian prisoners who had killed the most Israelis.”
In the first phase of the latest deal, 95 Palestinian prisoners will be freed in exchange for 33 Israeli hostages, although it is not clear if they are alive or dead.
The ideological differences were also clear when exchanging dead bodies, said Baskin, recalling a conversation he had with the Hamas deputy leader Saleh al-Arouri, who was killed by a drone in Beirut last year.
“Harouri said he was jealous of Israeli society that puts such value on one soldier. There [were] a lot of times I was asked to negotiate bodies for bodies, and I had conversations with Hamas who laughed at me and [said], ‘When they’re killed and they’re shaheeds [martyrs]’, they immediately go to heaven … In their view, bodies are not for negotiating, they don’t have the same value as they have for Jews.”
Originally Published by the London Times at
https://www.thetimes.com/world/middle-east/israel-hamas-war/article/israeli-negotiator-i-pushed-down-my-anger-in-talks-with-hamas-c2xt7fmh8
