A former peace negotiator who worked on a high-profile prisoner swap shares on what it could take for captives in Gaza to be returned.
Middle East director for the International Communities Organization Gershon Baskin also explains what he’s hearing from his contacts in Hamas.
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DAEMON FAIRLESS: Hi, I’m Daemon Fairless.
KEREN: I didn’t know if she’s dead or alive until yesterday. All I knew is that she might be kidnapped.
DAEMON FAIRLESS: This is the mother of Mia Schem on Tuesday, the day after Hamas released a minute long video of her daughter. It’s believed to be the first video of a hostage in Gaza. In it, the 21-year-old French Israeli woman says she was taken from an Israeli music festival during Hamas’s attack on October 7th, that she’s being taken care of, and pleads to get out as soon as possible.
KEREN: She looks very terrified. She looks like she’s in big pain. I can see that she’s saying what they tell her to say, but I can see that she’s stable.
DAEMON FAIRLESS: On Monday, the Israeli military said there are 199 captives being held in Gaza. Hamas says it’s 250, with 50 of those people held by factions other than Hamas. The hostages include soldiers and civilians. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says at least three Canadians could be among them. And while Canada hasn’t named anyone, the son of Israeli Canadian peace activist, Vivian Silver, says after his mother’s disappearance, the best case scenario is that she’s alive and being held captive. The last time he heard from her was the day of the attack. They’d been speaking on the phone while his mother hid in her closet, when he says he heard shots in the background.
SON: So we decided to stop talking on the phone so they don’t hear her. And we moved to corresponding via WhatsApp up until she told me, she wrote me that they’re in the house, and that was it.
DAEMON FAIRLESS: With so many unknowns about how this hostage crisis could play out, today, I want to get the perspective of someone who’s negotiated with Hamas before. Gershon Baskin is the Middle East director for the international community’s organization and a former peace negotiator. He’s based in Jerusalem. In 2011, he was involved in negotiations for the release of Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier held captive by Hamas for five years, in exchange for the release of over a thousand Palestinian prisoners.
[Music: Theme]
DAEMON FAIRLESS: Hi, Gershon. Thanks so much for coming on the show.
Gershon Baskin
DAEMON FAIRLESS: Gershon, you’ve been in previous negotiations with Hamas, and you say you’ve been speaking to your contacts about the situation that’s currently unfolding. What are they telling you?
GERSHON BASKIN: There are very different messages and then the messages are changing over time. After last Saturday, there was a message of bravado, of our march to victory, of our liberation of Palestine, we’re going to free all the prisoners. Two nights ago, I was being asked if a small prisoner exchange for some of the hostages might be possible. And they’re talking now about a ceasefire. They want Israel to stop the bombing. This is their number one priority also, but they have not released their belief that they can still free Palestinian prisoners from Israeli prisons. And that’s a big part of their demand. Part of the whole ethos of Hamas and the current leadership there is to free all the Palestinian prisoners in Israel because the leadership itself were freed in a hostage deal for the release of Gilad Shalit.
SOUNDCLIP
FEMALE SPEAKER: Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, is freed after five years of captivity in the Gaza Strip.
MALE SPEAKER: A historic agreement that took more than five years to negotiate and less than 12 hours to execute.
DAEMON FAIRLESS: Really briefly, I don’t know how much of this you can tell me, but who exactly are you talking to?
GERSHON BASKIN: I’m talking to two Hamas leaders in Gaza. One of them is the interlocutor that I most communicated with and negotiated the Gilad Shalit deal. There are the bodies of two Israeli soldiers and two Israeli civilians who are alive in Gaza. And we’ve been trying to negotiate a deal for them for seven or eight years. Then about two years ago, we started talking about a long term ceasefire. I’m also talking to one of the founders of Hamas in Gaza. I sent messages to another very senior leader in Gaza who receives the message, opens them, but doesn’t respond. And I’m also sending messages to one of the most senior Hamas leaders in Doha in Qatar, who also reads the messages and doesn’t respond. The last time I spoke with him over the telephone was more than two years ago. I should mention I’m also talking to some Israeli colleagues, very senior former officers from the Shin Bet and the Mossad who are talking to people in the war cabinet. And I’m talking to someone else, a colleague in London, who’s speaking directly to the Qataris.
DAEMON FAIRLESS: Okay. So what do we know about where this hostages might currently be held?
GERSHON BASKIN: Well, the assumption is that they’re spread out around Gaza. We understand that they’re being held by Hamas Islamic Jihad, the Popular front, and also individuals who were armed and took hostages themselves. And we understand that Hamas has demanded to be in control of all the hostages, and that’s apparently not what is happening. We don’t know where any of them are, but I’m assuming that the Israelis are collecting intelligence information prior to the ground incursion from the telephones that they confiscated from several hundred dead terrorists who were killed in South Israel. And let’s not forget Israel’s technological ability to penetrate every single cell phone in Gaza itself. So I assume that the Israelis by now probably know the location of some of them. I’m assuming that they’re underground.
DAEMON FAIRLESS: Right.
GERSHON BASKIN: Gilad Shalit was kept in the basement of a home for the longest period of time that he was in captivity and there was a family living above him. But unlike Gilad Shalit, they will not be able to keep the place of all these hostages secret as they did with Shalit for five years and four months.
DAEMON FAIRLESS: Right. And what’s the possibility that some of the hostages might be moved outside Gaza? Is that feasible?
GERSHON BASKIN: Zero. They have nowhere to go and the Egyptians would never let them in. The Egyptians are monitoring their border with very, very strong controls. They’re afraid of a sea flow of Palestinians exiting Gaza into Sinai. President Sisi already spoke yesterday and today saying that Egypt will not take over the burden of the Palestinian issue and he will not be a partner to another Palestinian Nakba, another Palestinian catastrophe.
SOUNDCLIP
FEMALE SPEAKER: The Palestinian cause is the main cause for the Arabs, says Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi. It’s important that its people remain steadfast and present on their land.
GERSHON BASKIN: So that was resealed.
[music]
DAEMON FAIRLESS: All right. So going back to October 7th, why do you think Hamas took these hostages? What in their mind did they stand to gain?
GERSHON BASKIN: I can’t imagine that they believed that it would be so easy to breach the Israeli border in so many places. I cannot believe that they believed that they would be able to bring in a thousand commandos, fighters, terrorist from themselves, from Islamic Jihad, from a popular front and armed individuals. I don’t believe that what happened in the civilian communities was part of the plan, although it might have been. It was certainly part of the plan to murder young people who were at the music festival because that was done by Hamas with machine guns and RPGs. They were equipped to do a mass murder and they did a mass murder, some 270 young people. I know that one of their primary goals is to free Palestinian prisoners. And people in Hamas told me, although I don’t believe them, that their plan was to attack two army bases and to abduct Israeli soldiers to hold as hostages for a prisoner exchange. But they went far beyond that.
SOUNDCLIP
FEMALE SPEAKER: People running for their lives, hiding in groves of trees, dying in the road. Some concert goers dragged into Gaza, hostages mutilated and paraded.
GERSHON BASKIN: What is the rationale for that? I don’t know. Hamas was playing out of a different rule book than they played for the past 17 years.
DAEMON FAIRLESS: So I just want to make sure I’m understanding this. So do you think that to some extent, some of the hostage taking was kind of opportunistic?
GERSHON BASKIN: I think it was opportunistic in a rage and a killing spree. What they did is unexplainable in any human terms, and it’s beyond our capacity as human beings to understand what they did there.
DAEMON FAIRLESS: Initially, Hamas was threatening to execute a hostage every time Israel bombs homes without warning in Gaza.
GERSHON BASKIN: That message was pulled back. It was issued very much at the beginning by Abu Zubaydah, the spokesperson of Hamas. And a couple of days later, Ismail Haniyeh, speaking from Doha in Qatar, pulled that back. I would take the threat seriously. What they did start doing two nights ago, I believe it was, when they showed the first video of a 21-year-old woman captured.
DAEMON FAIRLESS: Mia Schem.
GERSHON BASKIN: Yes, Mia Schem, who was wounded and apparently being treated, although that could also be a complete and total fake news to gain sympathy of the Israeli public. It was clear that this was psychological warfare, and this is part of the knowledge that Hamas has 199 points of leverage and pressure over Israeli society.
DAEMON FAIRLESS: Hmm. But we’ve heard from Hamas that hostages have already died. On Monday, the spokesperson for Hamas’s military branch claimed that 22 hostages were killed in Israeli strikes. Should we be taking what Hamas is saying about this at face value?
GERSHON BASKIN: No, not at all. There’s a very good chance that hostages have been killed both by Hamas. People who were wounded may have died already. There are some very old people who were taken hostage who need medication. There are several people who are diabetic and need insulin. So there’s a likelihood that some hostages may have died already. There’s also a possibility that some hostages died from the Israeli bombings. We should not assume that that is not possible, but I would not believe anything that Hamas says on record in their telegram account or any announcements that they make. That’s all part of the psychological warfare that they engage in. They have done it for many, many years. They did it for the five years of Gilad Shalit. They’ve been doing it with the families of Oron Shaul and Hadar Goldin, who were killed in 2014, and with the families of Averamin Giusto and Hisham Issa, the two Israeli civilians who are not mentally healthy, who have been in Gaza for nine years. So we should not take anything that they say at face value. It’s all part of their warfare.
[music]
DAEMON FAIRLESS: Under what conditions has Hamas said it will release hostages?
GERSHON BASKIN: They have made two announcements. One was made a couple of nights ago by the Iranian foreign Ministry after Ismail Haniyeh visited Tehran, in which they said they would release all the hostages for a complete and total comprehensive Israeli ceasefire.
SOUNDCLIP
[male speaker speaking in another language]
GERSHON BASKIN: The second announcement was by Osama Hamdan, the senior Hamas person in Beirut, who said last night that they would release all the civilian hostages for a full and comprehensive ceasefire.
SOUNDCLIP
MALE SPEAKER: Osama, at least are you ready to release the non-military civilians that are now captive in Gaza? Do you have any condition for that?
OSAMA HAMDAN: Well, as the leader of our brigade has said, that we consider them as guests. We will release them as soon as the war ends to guarantee their safety without conditions.
GERSHON BASKIN: Now, here’s the problem. Civilians, we don’t know what that means because Hamas treats all Israelis as soldiers, particularly the younger people, men and women. Certainly, the real soldiers that they did take are men and women, as well as anyone who might serve in reserve duty. Hamas opens up Facebook accounts and Twitter accounts and Instagram. And if they see any of the Israelis they’ve identified wearing an army uniform or with an army unit, they’re soldiers. They’re not civilians. So who’s included? Some of the women, some of the old people, some of the children, maybe, we don’t know. And then what’s also suspicious is that they say ceasefire, and they don’t talk about what that means because Israel could give a ceasefire, get the hostages and then start the war again the next day. And Hamas knows that. So if Hamas is communicating these messages via NBC, the U.S. television news, or from some spokesperson in Beirut making a speech for the media, this is not real. If Hamas wants to make a deal, they have negotiators that can speak directly to the Qataris or others to get their message through to the people who need to hear it, and that’s the Americans to the Israelis. You don’t negotiate through the public media. So none of these statements have any value in terms of a negotiated end of anything.
DAEMON FAIRLESS: Short of a ceasefire, what have Hamas said they need to make a prisoner swap?
GERSHON BASKIN: I think that a deal is possible for women, children, elderly and sick in exchange for the women and minors who are in Israeli prison. Most of them have thrown stones or Molotov cocktails or done things like that at Israeli soldiers. There are no important Hamas people or Hamas related people amongst them. And to the best of my knowledge, none of them have killed Israelis. So this is a deal which is in principle possible if we can save women, children, elderly and sick hostages. But quite frankly, from what I understand, after last night’s bombing at the hospital, regardless of who did it, Israel is taking the blame from the whole entire Arab world. The Qataris who were mediating withdrew from the mediation. It seems to me that the clock is ticking fast and the window is about to close. When the ground operation begins, there won’t likely be a chance of negotiating anymore. What needs to happen now is that the Americans need to push hard. And the leverage that the Americans have is on the Qatari government to issue an ultimatum to the Hamas leadership in Qatar that if they don’t immediately release hostages, the Hamas leadership will be exiled from Qatar. Now, why would Qatar do that? Why would the Americans do that? Qatar spent billions of dollars on the World Cup, to be integrated into the global community. Qatar Airlines is flying all over the world, one of the best airlines in the world. They spent and made great efforts to be a member of the community of nations. They repaired their relations with the other Gulf Cooperation countries. And I think that the threat of sanctions by the U.S. government of being supporters of terrorism could be very effective on the Qatari government to force Hamas to release hostages. At the same time, the Americans are going to have to weigh heavily on the Israeli side because I know that there are people in the war cabinet who would agree to a deal like this, but not everyone and maybe not Netanyahu himself. So if we’re going to get hostages out alive, we need quick American action now like from the president before he takes off on an Air Force One, to get his messages to the Qatari government and to the Israeli war cabinet. This can be done. It can be done in the next 24 to 48 hours if we need to do it, but it has to be done now.
[music]
DAEMON FAIRLESS: Gershon, over the past week, I’ve heard the Entebbe raid mentioned a few times. So just for folks who aren’t aware of it, that’s the incident in 1976 where Israeli commandos rescued a plane of hostages hijacked to Uganda, killing the hijackers. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s brother was killed in that operation. What’s the likelihood of that kind of armed rescue working here?
GERSHON BASKIN: So we won’t have another Entebbe here. That’s impossible. The hostages are spread out. They’re not in one location. There will be some miraculous military operations by special forces to go in and rescue some of the hostages. There will be. We have to believe that there will be some successful rescues by Israeli special forces. They’re trained for it and Israel is collecting the intelligence. But there’s also likely to be rescue attempts that will be less successful. It seems to me, and this is a very huge dilemma for the entire Israeli society and for the government and the military, but it seems to me that the primary directive right now of our society is the elimination of Hamas as a body that can continue to govern and threaten Israel from Gaza. And that seems to me at this point where public opinion is to take priority over saving the hostages. That could change over time where the priorities would shift. But it seems to me right now that the Israelis have already paid such a high price and are so traumatized by the most significant breach of Israel’s security in its entire history. This is serious trauma that we’re dealing with both in terms of the ethos that we are protected, that we have a border which is secure, and of course, the horrific things that Hamas and the others did inside of Israel. And that has made the Israeli public be in a place where the first thing they want done is getting rid of Hamas.
DAEMON FAIRLESS: So on that front, Israel is dropping missiles on Gaza. It seems to be preparing for a ground incursion. And Hamas, of course, is firing rockets back. What I’m curious about is what impact that all has on the ability to get the hostages back.
GERSHON BASKIN: Everything here is very complicated. And I think as you mentioned, there are missiles being dropped on the civilian population in Gaza. We also have to realize that what Hamas did has taken the Palestinian cause back 75 years, and Palestinians are becoming refugees once again from their homes. More than 600,000 Palestinians have had their homes destroyed. This is a very poor population with a history of refugee status. 80% of the people in Gaza are refugees or descendants of refugees. They are being destroyed and experiencing the biggest trauma that they have gone through in their history since 1948. This is another Nakba, and Hamas is no doubt responsible for it. But we can’t also escape the responsibility of Israel for what’s being done to the civilian population in Gaza, because there will be a day after tomorrow that we’re going to have to face each other and realize that while we may never forget what was done to us by the other, we also have to find the strength to be able to look forward to create a new reality. So the more that we can save the lives of hostages, will help Israel and Israeli society today and tomorrow, the more that the Israelis can take care not to kill innocent people. Deaths in Gaza, Most of them are civilians. Most of them are young children and women. And I have a friend in Gaza who I’ve been helping financially over the couple of years with contributions every so often to help them buy food. She’s a young woman with a nine-month-old baby. And today, she contacts me and starts the conversation by asking me if I’m okay. Her baby, her nine-month-old baby was wounded today. She’s living in the streets. She is someone who is not at war with Israel and she is one of these victims. She told me in a message on WhatsApp half an hour ago, please tell the Jews, this is the first time she used that word with me, please tell the Jews to stop bombing us.
DAEMON FAIRLESS: So then what would you call on Israel to do on the military front to make the safety and return of hostages possible?
GERSHON BASKIN: Well, what I’m saying is that we have a chance for a small deal. I’ve been urging the Israelis to be in direct contact with the Qataris. That hasn’t happened. I’ve been urging that for days. Instead, they’ve been talking to the Americans who have been talking to the Qataris. But as I said, it’s time for the Americans to take off the gloves and start punching hard because the Qataris stopped negotiating as of last night. They’ve been non-responsive all day today. The last message that we got from the Qatari mediator was we’re out of this after the barbarism of the attack last night, was his words, on the hospital. We are no longer negotiating.
[music]
DAEMON FAIRLESS: You’ve been contacted by the families of some of the people Hamas is holding. What have they been telling you about what they hope to see?
GERSHON BASKIN: They haven’t been telling me what they hope to see. Of course, they hope to see their loved ones brought home. They’ve been asking me questions to give them comfort and strength. And I told them some things that are not probably relevant. I told them that Gilad Shalit in five years and four months was never physically harmed. He was never tortured. He was fed. He was cared for. He was treated relatively well and usually with a degree of respect. I was telling them that if anyone on the Israeli side tells them they should be quiet and sit and do nothing, that we’re doing everything that can be done, they shouldn’t believe them. Our experience is that every family of every hostage probably everywhere in the world is told that by their governments, and it’s wrong advice. They need a lot of noise. They need to tell their story. They need to get their names known. These are not numbers. These are human beings who had a life and a story to tell. And the more that we can humanize them, the greater the chances, I believe, of keeping them alive.
SOUNDCLIP
FEMALE SPEAKER: In Tel Aviv, people pin their hopes up on a wall outside Israel’s Ministry of Defence. Avihai Brodtz, whose wife and three children are missing, says it must be the primary concern.
AVIHAI BRODTZ: You think about me first and about all of the families around me, you know, and it should be just such an obvious thing around the world that families are first.
GERSHON BASKIN: We need to make appeals, I tell them, not to their French foreign minister, but to the Arab media, to the Arab speaking language press, to Arab television and to the whole world in general. But they need to focus their energy on talking to the Israeli government to be ready to make a deal if a deal can be made and to get their stories out to everyone in the world, particularly in the neighbourhood that we live, in Jordan, in Egypt, in the Emirates, in Bahrain, in Saudi Arabia, in Qatar and in Gaza and in the West Bank.
DAEMON FAIRLESS: This is an incredibly grim question, Gershon, but how likely is it that these hostages will make it out alive?
GERSHON BASKIN: I have no way of answering that question. I don’t know. We have to hope that miracles will happen. We have to hope that. I believe that the hostages are not being held by the elite forces in Gaza, but they’re being held by lower level people and individuals who might actually want to leave when this is over. And there might be some of the hostage holders who desert their post once the Israeli army invades. There might be hostage holders who heed the calls that Israel has been making. And Israel should raise the voice on this and say to them, if you turn over hostages or a hostage, you will be granted amnesty and an exit and a package of money for you to go anywhere in the world. The other hostage keepers should know and we should be telling them that at the end of this, whether the hostages live or die, they’re going to be dead. Every person who’s holding a hostage is going to be killed. And they should know this because as I said, these are not the disciplined people who were in charge of the Shalit file. These are all kinds of rank and file, Hamas and Jihad and other operatives at much lower levels and probably less obligation to the commanders. And there are ways of influencing their psyche as well. So we need to do the military ops. We need to negotiate releases. We need to do all the psychological warfare that we can do on the people who are holding these hostages. We need to be more sophisticated than they are, and we can do that. We need to be determined and we need to work together. We need to bring in some experts who actually know what they’re doing. I know that during years of the Gilad Shalit saga, they were having brainstorming and roleplaying exercises in the Ministry of Defence, where they were bringing in people on reserve duty to waste their time by strategizing on how to bring Gilad Shalit home rather than doing something that was real and meaningful. We don’t have time to wait. We don’t have five years for these hostages. Action has to be taken. Now, today, this hour.
DAEMON FAIRLESS: Gershon, thank you. I really appreciate you coming on. Thanks.
GERSHON BASKIN: My pleasure.
DAEMON FAIRLESS: That’s all for today. I’m Daemon Fairless. Thanks for listening to Front Burner, and I’ll talk to you tomorrow.
