From military leverage to diplomatic win

Four years ago, at my honourable discharge ceremony, I looked back on five years of compulsory service and twenty-three more in the reserves and thought I had fully served my country.

Yet two years later, on that horrific morning when my phone remained silent, no call or order telling me where to report, I waited that long day and then decided to rejoin my former unit of my own accord.
For more than 180 days, my army comrades and I operated combat teams and delivered precision ordnance in their support. From the command post, we watched the troops push forward, fighting a vicious enemy that had long hidden behind civilians.

I was not sure where it would all lead. I cared only for one thing: that Israel would destroy Hamas and bring every hostage home. I believe that time has come.

Two years on, Israel has not only defeated Hamas but also dealt Hezbollah a heavy blow, forcing its terrorists north of the Litani, caused Asad’s regime to be toppled, seized key positions inside Syria and Lebanon, and neutralised Iran’s nuclear threat in a twelve-day campaign.

The long-awaited deal now signed is being hailed in many quarters as President Trump and his special envoy’s diplomatic achievement. Undeniably, it is a remarkable feat by Israel’s greatest ally – one no other administration could likely have achieved.

Throughout the war, Trump’s commitment to Israel and to our hostages knew no boundaries. But to regard this achievement as the product of diplomatic pressure alone is to profoundly misunderstand its origins.
For months, Israel’s leadership faced intense domestic pressure – often detached from reality – to accept Hamas’s demands: a full withdrawal from the Strip in exchange for the hostages’ release.

Prime Minister Netanyahu was urged not to enter Rafah, not to secure and hold the Philadelphi Corridor, not to operate in other arenas – against Hezbollah and against Iran, and not to push into Gaza City. Fortunately, he insisted on doing what was right for Israel.

Israel’s anti-government protest movement, which cynically exploited the hostages’ torment, claimed that Trump coerced Netanyahu into accepting this deal. They accused the latter of torpedoing earlier proposals, abandoning the hostages, and prolonging the war for political gain.
On Saturday night, at the Hostages Square, these dissidents defiantly booed when Witkoff dared to mention Netanyahu’s name.

Previous frameworks proposed by the U.S. envoy and other mediators included only partial hostage releases and vague promises of “future talks”. Such deals would have given Hamas the breathing space it needed to rehabilitate its terror capabilities and infrastructures.

Those proposals shared the same fatal flaw: they handed Hamas a victory it could never win on the battlefield. And yet, it rejected even those offers repeatedly.

The deal now signed was never on the table until Hamas was broken. It was not born in conference rooms or in the streets, but forged under fire and extracted by force.

Israel will recover all its hostages within seventy-two hours of the deal’s implementation. Hamas, in turn, is bound to disarm under Arab supervision. Israel retains control over key security corridors and positions inside Gaza including a broader buffer zone, and crucially, no Palestinian state is included in this framework.

Albeit the many notorious terrorists Israel is compelled to release and despite the likelihood that Hamas will eventually breach the agreement by refusing to disarm, none of these terms existed in any previous deals.
This deal is a settlement on Israel’s terms, secured through military leverage delivered by Netanyahu, and political resolve crafted by Trump.

Hamas believed it could wait Israel out – that global outrage, human suffering, and Western hesitation would eventually erode Israel’s resolve. Instead, it was the relentless eradication of Hamas’s own capabilities and its growing diplomatic isolation that ended the war.

The only reason a deal of this scope became possible is that the IDF decimated Hamas’s command structure, seized more than seventy-five percent of the enclave, and advanced through Gaza City in pursuit of the remaining terrorists.

Egypt, Qatar, and even Turkey, once reluctant mediators, leaned on Hamas to accept the inevitable upon recognising Israel had stripped it of both its military capacity and its psychological leverage: the hostages.

The political demonstrations that cloaked themselves in concern for the hostages neither advanced this outcome nor brought them home sooner. On the contrary, they emboldened Hamas, convincing it that Israeli society was divided and could be pressured into concessions.

Israel’s endurance is the mere foundation of this deal, a vindication of a hard truth: diplomacy achieves nothing without force, and force achieves little without conviction. This principle must be tested in the next stages of the deal.

For all the anguish and sacrifice, this deal affirms that Israel’s leadership has not forgotten the oldest commandment of Jewish destiny: to redeem its captives, and to do so without surrendering its security, its sovereignty, or its soul.

Eyal is an Israeli-Australian living in Israel. A CTO of an IT consulting firm, serving as a volunteer staff officer (Major, Res) in an armoured brigade.