Signs all over the country urge the political leadership to accept a deal that has never been forthcoming.
Jerusalem, July 16 - Analysts both in Israel and abroad continued this week to conclude that the country's prime minister sees more benefit in continuing to fight the militant Islamist terrorists who run the Gaza Strip and have consistently rejected any deal to release all of the hostages it holds - its only bargaining chips - than in agreeing to long-term ceasefire agreement that the terrorists would never accept or honor anyway.
Commentators and media personalities, especially those who have staked out positions opposed to Binyamin Netanyahu, maintained their accusations that the hostages have not returned because Netanyahu has failed to press for their return or to agree to any deal for their return, ending the war, because, they insist, his political survival depends on the war, never mind that Hamas will never release all the hostages - certainly not the approximately twenty assumed still to be alive - because doing so would deprive them of the only leverage they have against Israel.
"One burst and everyone's home!" cry the signs all over the country, urging the political leadership to accept a deal that has never been forthcoming. Just this week, Hamas again rejected a proposal to end the war in exchange for the release of all the hostages.
Netanyahu, meanwhile, has instructed the IDF to continue putting military pressure on Hamas, gradually tightening the areas of the Gaza Strip still under Hamas control - clear evidence that Netanyahu has no interest in freeing the hostages, because if he wanted a deal to free the hostages, he would long ago have agreed to such a deal that exists only in the naïve fantasies of those who think a group that perpetrated the savagery of October 7 and made every hostage release a Third-Reich-level mob spectacle would, out of the goodness of their humanitarian hearts, just let go of the only card it has without military pressure.
Public opinion polls show Israelis overwhelmingly in favor of a nonexistent deal that would free all the hostages and end the war. Netanyahu rivals and critics now point to that political reality as evidence that he only wishes to postpone or escape the inevitable fall that awaits him after the end of the war, when voters will have to reckon with his administration's failure to prevent it or be prepared for it, even as other polls indicate the public has generally favorable opinions about how the government and military have handled the war.
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