JMA-PSOS

Over the past several months, American officials came to believe Sinwar had grown increasingly hardened — both in his determination to continue fighting Israel in Gaza but also in his own fatalistic outlook.

Sinwar did not expect he would survive the war, one US official said. Because he believed he would eventually be killed, he had little motivation to agree to a ceasefire, US officials assessed — leaving talks in a perpetual deadlock.

Instead of seeking peace in Gaza, American officials suspected Sinwar wanted the conflict to continue without an endpoint, bogging down Israel and damaging its international reputation.

To the end, US intelligence officials believed that Sinwar was unconcerned with his own mortality, and determined to continue the fight.

In practice, the injection of cash from Qatar, a practice that Netanyahu supported and approved, has served to strengthen the military arm of Hamas since 2012.

Netanyahu leaked a “top secret” document in order to thwart the military and diplomatic position of the cabinet, which sought to defeat Hamas with various means. We should heed what Avigdor Lieberman told Yedioth Ahronoth, in an interview published just before the October 7 assault, that Netanyahu “continuously thwarted all the targeted assassinations.”

Yuval Diskin, head of the Shin Bet security service from 2005 to 2011, told Yedioth Ahronoth in January 2013, “If we look at it over the years, one of the main people contributing to Hamas’s strengthening has been Bibi Netanyahu, since his first term as prime minister.”

In August 2019, former prime minister Ehud Barak told Army Radio that people who believed that Netanyahu had no strategy were mistaken. “His strategy is to keep Hamas alive and kicking… even at the price of abandoning the citizens [of the south] … in order to weaken the PA in Ramallah.”

[F]ormer IDF chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot told Maariv in January 2022 that Netanyahu acted “in total opposition to the national assessment of the National Security Council, which determined that there was a need to disconnect from the Palestinians and establish two states.” Israel moved in the exact opposition direction, weakening the PA and strengthening Hamas.

Shin Bet head Nadav Argaman spoke about this when he finished his term in 2021. He warned explicitly that the lack of dialogue between Israel and the PA had the effect of weakening the latter while bolstering Hamas.

The 2023 pogrom is a result of Netanyahu’s policy. It is not “a failure of the concept” – rather, this is the concept: Netanyahu and Hamas are political partners, and both sides have fulfilled their side of the bargain.