Within hours of the announcement that it had approved the ceasefire agreement over Gaza, Israel has made its first overt move to violate it—and it lies right at the heart of whether they will agree to having a stable, peaceful neighbor with the Palestinians, or not. On Wednesday evening, Oct. 8, the ceasefire agreement specified the names of the 250 Palestinian political prisoners to be released in exchange for the hostages. Key to that list is Marwan Barghouti, the “Nelson Mandela” of the Palestinians. Barghouti is widely recognized as a principled leader, in favor of the existence both of Israel and of Palestine, a member of the PA’s Fatah but also acceptable to Hamas, and odds-on-favorite to win a Palestinian election. Less well known is that there are those in Israeli intelligence who are aware of all these things.
On Wednesday evening, Oct. 8, the negotiators on both sides, along with U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff, signed off on the agreement. On Thursday, Oct. 9, an Israeli government spokeswoman announced that Marwan Barghouti will be excluded, saying, “I can tell you at this point in time that he will not be part of this release.” Then, last night, Oct. 9, in Witkoff’s presence, the Israeli cabinet approved of the agreement, while not publishing the 250 names. This morning, on Oct. 10, a government spokesman stated the list now had 270 names on it and that 250 of them would be released—suggesting that they had added names not agreed to, so as to keep imprisoned up to 20 individuals whom they had agreed to release.
Later today, on Oct. 10, Israel’s Ministry of Justice finally published the names of the 250 and, sure enough, Barghouti’s name has been removed, along with 10 others. They announced, as reported by the Times of Israel: “Some last-minute changes to the list were approved by the government in a telephone vote Friday morning....”
Further, they added a second provocation, also contrary to the ceasefire agreement, that they will release no one until after they receive all 28 bodies of the deceased hostages. (This is found in today’s “Government Decision No. 3396, “Outline for the Release of All Israeli Abductees,” section 2.2.) Finally, with a chilling third provocation, Israel announced that they had secret measures that they have decided to take if the bodies are not all delivered within 72 hours, which means they have already decided the deal is dead. Here are the details.
The Times of Israel wrote on Oct. 10: “A classified appendix to the government decision released Friday details the measures Israel would take if Hamas failed to release all 48 hostages in time.…” But, in fact, Israel knows both that this a physical impossibility and that the agreement already arranged for a team—drawn from the U.S., Türkiye, Egypt, Qatar, and Israel itself—which is tasked to find and recover the bodies of hostages whose locations remain unknown, including those believed to have been buried under Gaza’s vast network of tunnels and rubble. This team was never under any 72-hour deadline. And, previously, Israel’s own special coordinator for hostage affairs Gal Hirsch had explained: “Since we expect there to be difficulties, we acted to set up an international task force that will have everything needed, including information and resources, to return the hostages to Israel.”
The Israeli statement then claims that “negotiators” agreed to these changes. Assumedly, it is only their own negotiators being referred to. The Palestinian Prisoners’ Media Office issued a statement early on Oct. 10, saying that “the circulating lists concerning the prisoners intended for release as part of the exchange deal are inaccurate lists. The occupation is promoting these lists with the aim of pressuring and disrupting the course of negotiations. Official lists, if an agreement is reached, will be announced and published through the platforms of the Prisoners’ Media Office.” Later on Oct. 10, the Qatari-owned network Al Araby TV cited sources saying the Oct. 10 list published by Israel omitted some names that mediators had agreed on.
