Ask Haviv Anything - Episode 50: Hostage Deal - A new day for Gaza, a bad day for Hamas

Episode Date: October 9, 2025

On October 8, President Donald Trump announced that Israel and Hamas had agreed to his peace and hostage release deal. Israel's tormented hostages will soon be home.The agreement delivers almost everything the pro-Palestinian campaign claimed to want. No Israeli annexation, no Gazans have to leave and any who do can return, and a full rebuilding and rehabilitation under Arab and international auspices - all of it confirmed in an explicit Israeli commitment to the United States.It's the best possible deal for Gaza.And that's exactly why it's the worst possible deal for Hamas. Only Hamas loses here, only Hamas is required to disarm - or pretend to for a while. To relinquish authority - or pretend to for a while. It's no longer possible to pretend that Gaza's interests and Hamas's interests are the same. You can support one or the other, but not both.So will it work? And what does it tell us about the past two years, and about the future of Israelis and Palestinians?This episode was sponsored by the Goldstein family of Monsey, NY for the Refuah Shleimah (full and complete healing) of former hostage Romi Gonen and all the hostages. The Goldstein family writes: “Romi’s name was given to us 'randomly' (though nothing is truly random) by one of the hostage sites that sprang up after 10/7, to connect those who wanted to pray for hostages with an individual name and face. I printed this out, and Romi’s beautiful young face and name was taped to a chair at our dining table. Every breakfast, lunch, and dinner, there was Romi. Every Shabbos, there was Romi. We read more about her online, how she loves dance and leopard print clothes, how she had been a Tzofim (Scouts) leader, and I thought how much her troop of girls must miss her. I saw videos and interviews with her amazing mother Meirav as well, a powerful and articulate fellow Jewish mother. When Romi’s name was announced as one of the young women scheduled for release, our prayers were being answered! Seeing her walking out, being embraced by her family! We cheered, and cried. And we continue to cheer for Romi. Through multiple surgeries, through what looks like grueling physical therapy, Romi is prevailing. Romi, and every former and current hostage, continue to be in our prayers. They are extraordinary, every one of them."If you like this podcast, please join us on Patreon to support our work: https://www.patreon.com/AskHavivAnything⁠.If you would like to sponsor an episode, please email us at [e-mail]⁠.Musical intro by Adam Ben Amitai.

Hi, everybody. Welcome to a fast comment episode of Ask Aviv Anything. This is a monumental moment, a true pivot of the war, of the future of Israelis and Palestinians and of Gaza. President Trump yesterday, I'm recording on Thursday, October 9. President Trump yesterday announced that there was a deal. I myself, like many Israelis, didn't get to bed until four in the morning because those are the hours in which the announcement was made, and we all tried to understand what it meant. and frankly we were just all too excited and happy at the end of the war, at the end of the torment for the hostages,

at the end of the torment for Gazins and the homelessness and the suffering of two peoples locked in to this terrible war. We learn so much about everything that has happened in this moment of truth. We learn who suddenly opposes a ceasefire when there's a ceasefire. We learn how. the Americans actually pulled it together to force Hamas to the table through American alliances in a way that, how shall I put it, America remains indispensable, even though it's trying not to be. And we learn a lot about what the future of Gaza will look like. I want to get

into all of that. And before I do, I just want to tell you that this episode is sponsored in really astonishingly beautiful sponsorship by the Goldstein family of Moncey, New York, the refua shlema, the full and complete healing of hostage Romi Gunnen and of all the hostages who were in Gaza, who came out until now, and who will be coming out hopefully by Monday within three or four days. The Goldstein family writes to us, Romi's name was given to us randomly, parentheses, though nothing is truly random, by one of the hostage sites that sprang up after October 7 to connect those in the diaspora, those who wanted to pray for hostages

with an individual name and face of a specific hostage. I printed it out, and Rumi's beautiful young face and name was taped to a chair at our dining table. Every breakfast, lunch, and dinner there was Romi. Every Shabbis there was Romi. Every Yomtov, meaning holiday, there was Romi. We set aside a menorah for her with our families' minoras at Hanukkah, two years in a row.

When the Shavuis cookbook came out from the hostage families forum. We baked her white chocolate cheesecake, which was great, by the way. We read more about her online, how she loves dance and leopard print clothes, how she had been a Zulfim leader, a scout leader, and I thought of how much her troop of girls must miss her. I saw videos and interviews with her amazing mother, Merav as well. A powerful and articulate fellow Jewish mother, when Romy's name was announced as one of the young women scheduled for release, our prayers were being answered, seeing her walking out, being embraced by her family. We cheered and cried, and we continue to cheer for Romi. Through multiple surgeries, through what

looks like grueling physical therapy, Romi is prevailing. Romi is prevailing. Romi and every former and current hostage continue to be in our prayers. Their names are familiar to me as I recite them by my Shabbis candles. They are extraordinary, every one of them. All Israel are revim Zheba Zay, all of Israel are responsible for one another. Thank you so much to the Goldstein family for that beautiful dedication. Friends, this is a shocking moment. It really is. And one of the shocking things about it on the international stage is the silence.

From the silence of the pro-Palestinian campaign, we can learn a lot. You don't have to be silent, even if you don't, like every aspect of the deal, even if the deal leaves the full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza to the second stage, even if you have critiques of the deal, the deal ends the war. It ends the genocide which you believe is underway. Why is anything allowed to interfere with that end, unless you don't really believe that that's actually what's happening, that it's a wanton genocide. They haven't just been telling us lies about what they believe that they want a ceasefire. Now that a ceasefire is on the table and the Israelis have not just agreed to it, they've committed

to the Americans to it. And the entirety of the Arab world basically is behind it. Everybody wants it. And they can't back it. They can't back it with reservations. All they can do is go silent, frustrated, mourning. They've been telling us these lies, but they've been telling themselves lies. about what exactly it is that they support. Because here's the thing. This deal has some serious problems for Israel. It actually leaves the disarmament of Hamas to a second phase.

Nobody knows how we get to, how we negotiate that. It kicks the can down the road. Israel's grabbing onto it because the hostage release is right at the beginning. But the things Israel needs from Hamas, its victory conditions, are not at the beginning. What this deal is, is a perfect win for Gaza.

It's the best case for an end-of-war agreement for Gaza. Gaza isn't just not annexed, not settled by Israel. Those are explicit commitments made by Israel in the Trump deal. Meaning Smutrichen, Ben-Vir, and all their rhetoric of two years is irrelevant. It's not happening. Everything everyone wanted for Gaza or pretended to want for Gaza. Not just an end to the war, but actual rehabilitation, massive rebuilding. It's all there.

No Gazan is forced to leave, and any Ghazan who chooses to leave has the right to come back, in a commitment by the Israelis to the Americans with the backing of the entire Arab world. It's all there. Wall-to-wall Arab support, infinite money, bottomless sympathy. This is the best-case future for Gaza. Gaza has a chance now to become what it should always have been, what a government that wasn't locked into a forever war because of its religion, because of a peculiar insane religious ideology that demanded a genocide of the people next door for all time,

a Gaza not ruled by such people would have been a beautiful Mediterranean emirate with natural gas reserves off the coast. That's the Gaza envisioned by this agreement, and Israel is on board. It's the best possible outcome for Gaza. and that's exactly what makes it the worst possible outcome for Hamas. Only Hamas loses here. It may turn out in future that Israel lost as well because some of the things Israel needs don't end up happening. We don't know yet.

A lot is up in the air. The Hamas loses for sure. Only Hamas is required to disarm or pretend to disarm for long enough for the rebuilding to happen. Only Hamas is required to relinquish authority in Gaza. or pretend to relinquish authority for as long as it takes for the rebuilding to happen. Just getting Hamas to appear to pretend to concede this beautiful future for Gaza

took this scale of war. You can hate the Israelis. Sure. It's a terrible war. You can come down on the side of the people who have suffered more. But you really believe seeing this deal that Hamas and Gaza

have the same interests Hamas that built the most comprehensive bomb shelter system in all of human history and warfare and didn't let a single civilian into any of those 500 kilometers of tunnels larger than the London underground in two years of terrible

war you think Hamas itself thinks that Gazan's own interests long-term future interests are the same as Hamas's interests? With this deal it's no longer possible to pretend that the interests of Hamas have anything to do with a better future for Gaza. They're living out a religious fantasy, and they're willing to sacrifice Gaza on the altar of that fantasy. And so the pro-Palestinian campaigners, activists, marchers, they're in mourning.

They're facing this terrible cognitive dissonance. They are silent at the moment of the thing they have been pretending to want for two years. It's no longer possible to pretend that the pro-Palestinian campaign's interests overlaps with the interests of a better future for Gaza. It really never was about Gaza, about the real people suffering in a terrible war. And I want to be clear, I believe that most of the people marching genuinely believe that's what they were marching for, a better future for Gaza. That's what the decent, well-meaning majority

just horrified by images of war thought they were marching for. But here we are at the end, and the activist corps that mobilizes them each time is silent. The activist core, the purpose of the grant mobilization campaigns, turn out not to have been about a ceasefire. It was only ever a campaign to back Hamas' religious forever war, and it was a religious forever war to destroy my people.

There was one genocide being advocated over the past two years, and it wasn't for Gaza. That's what their silence right now actually means. President Trump. What President Trump pulled off here should be studied in the history books. Netanyahu carried out that operation in Doha, the bombing, the Israeli air strike, targeting Hamas leaders in Qatar. And the fallout, first of all, was a failure, right? There was a French writer who once said of Napoleon's decision to execute a French nobleman.

It was worse than a crime. It was a mistake. Screwing it up is worse than the ethical questions. Don't screw it up. If you're going to do something with that level of fallout and potential ramifications. But there was this strike. and it failed. And it destabilized Qatar's own sense

of where this conflict was going, because suddenly it was entering Katari territory. And Qatar went to the United States. And Qatar screamed and shouted and said, we have to have protection. And then President Trump did something truly brilliant. He said, sure, absolutely. An executive order promising to come to your aid militarily

if you're attacked. full-on protection in exchange for the hostages in exchange for bending Hamas was it a conscious purposeful planned good cop bad cop routine as the Netanyahu supporters say I tend to give credence to that theory because there were too many leaks of anger and tension between Trump and Netanyahu followed by too many warm handshakes immediately afterward I tend to think and half the leaks were then denied by

I tend to think that there was a game being played. And by the way, they've done it before, which is why it's not a crazy thing to think that they're capable of it. But maybe it wasn't a good cop, bad cop routine, even if now they're going to try and spin it that way, because why not? It makes them look great. Maybe the frustration, Trump's genuine frustration with BB's strike on Qatar,

was totally genuine. That only makes Trump more impressive because it means he took the lemonade, he took the lemons, excuse me, an Israeli strike he thought was irresponsible and destabilizing to a close American an ally and also a failure, and he made out of it lemonade. He turned it around. He said to Qatar, that's awful, that's terrible. I'll guarantee it never happens again. But in exchange, you give me

Hamas. If that's how Trump dealt with those lemons, then Trump showed us, demonstrated that Qatar has been part of the problem all along. Qatar was not mediating. Qatar was backing Hamas, supporting Hamas, allowing and helping, and sometimes possibly Israeli intelligence believes telling Hamas to continue the war rather than to end it, because it believed it had Israel right where it wanted it. And Al Jazeera was carrying the message to the Arab world and radicalizing everybody the Qataris wanted radicalized. After the agreement with Trump, Al Jazeera pivoted on a dime. No more just wild, insane headlines. They're still covering the war. They're still talking about the suffering of Gazans. But it isn't at that fever pitch that

it has been at for two years running. It isn't at an obsessive focus to the erasure of all other issues and wars and questions in the Middle East, even ones larger than Gaza. And so Hamas found itself with the Egyptians sick of the war, sick of the destabilizing effect the war is having on the Egyptian public opinion, very, very keen on a Trump peace deal in which Israel actually commits that Ghazans remain in Gaza. We had an episode where we discussed, Mariam Wahba discussed in great detail why, and by the way, convincingly to me,

why Egypt actually has a point in fearing Ghazins leaving Gaza into Sinai. The Turks eager to shore up ties with America. The Turks are some of the great funders and backers of Hamas and of Hamas affiliated groups all over in Jerusalem and in Gaza. But they are eager to come closer to America, and so they're eager for this war to end. The war has become a problem inside the radical Muslim Brotherhood access to the Middle East

in its attempts to have better relations with the West, with America, stability and moving forward on a whole bunch of policy things. And Hamas was standing in the way. And now Hamas lost Egypt, it lost Qatar, and it lost Turkey. And it caved. Folks, everything that happened today or yesterday could have happened in May. in Maine, Netanyahu stood up and he said

Israel has four conditions the hostages obviously Hamas is disarmed, leaders go into exile and Gaza is demilitarized going forward those are the conditions those are all in the deal it could have agreed to this five months ago

Hamas is now going to try to survive it had no choice but to go to this it lost Qatar The Israeli strike on Doha gave the Americans the leverage they needed to force Qatar to actually drop their support, their backing for Hamas that allowed Hamas to continue the war for all time. The Israeli military entry into Gaza City, the last major sanctuary Hamas had, was actually threatening Hamas's last hiding places, last tunnel system. And now Hamas has agreed. And the whole question now is will it try to survive?

obviously it'll try will it survive it has to let the rehabilitation go forward of by the way Gaza but also of itself while also keeping other powers in Gaza potential power centers the Abu Shabab militia but many others there's one in eastern

Han Yunus keeping them down rebuilding its own capabilities finding ways to once again and forever leach off Gaza's society to rebuild itself its food its ranks of fighting men

friends Hamas isn't gone it still has guns it's going to try to retake Gaza it's going to try to return to the forever war because its version of Islam tells it it must

at any and all cost to the death of the last Ghazin Razi Hamad told CNN that three weeks ago every dead Gazin in this war is a Palestinian success if my people were led by such leaders I would hate them viscerly

and my people would have fallen long ago. Those who actually want Israel destroyed in the pro-Palestinian campaign are also going to back it, or in the Middle East, like the Qatari regime, are going to back it to the hilt once again in that future civil war in Gaza where Hamas makes its comeback. There is some significant chance we're going to be right back here in five years. And here's the key going forward.

because the forces that pretended to want a ceasefire but only actually wanted a Hamas victory, they're still there and they're silent now so that they can find their voice again when Hamas tries to make that comeback in six months or in four years. The interim process, not phase one, which is stop fighting, the IDF pulls out,

clears itself out of half of Gaza, allows a rehabilitation and rebuilding process to actually get going and begin and all the hostages come out. That's phase one. Phase two is the beginning of the interim process, the actual disarmament, the actual removal of Hamas, a new governorship, international, backed by the Arab world,

a stabilization force of some kind. We don't exactly know the details. But here's the key. The future of Gaza depends on the details of that interim process of phase two. The interim process has to kill the Hamas aspirational, to bring us all back to this point five years from now. Will an international force, will Arab police forces or stabilization forces,

will an international community, will a Muslim world eager to de-radicalize Gaza so Gaza can have the great future envisioned in the Trump plan? Will all that come to fruition? Obviously, in the Middle East, the good money is always going to be on pessimism. No, it won't. It won't succeed, and Hamas will be back. But here's my optimism. My optimism now was my optimism two years ago. Right after October 7, one of the first things I was explaining to anybody who would talk to me

was that you don't understand Israeli resolve. You don't understand what you have awakened. You just convinced us. By the very kind of war you decided to bring on Gaza, that you are totally undeterable because the destruction of Gaza you view as your military success, as your great leverage over the Israelis as the goal, the strategy, the fundamental strategy, rather than the thing to be avoided.

Most governments believe that the destruction of their side is the thing to be avoided. You go to war to prevent it. Hamas believes that that is what war is. That's your last leverage. You're not going to defeat the Israelis with tanks and commandos. You're going to defeat the Israelis with the destruction of your own people. I argued that all of it is going to fail.

The Israelis have the resolve. They're going to go to Hezbollah eventually. They're going to go to Iran. I suspected we were heading into five years of war. It turned out it was two years. But that Israeli resolve, I want to be very clear here. You can love the Israelis. You can hate the Israelis.

You can mourn what I'm about to say. But what I'm about to say is a fact. It's a strategic reality, whether or not you like it. Deal with it. Plan for it. Neutral, totally neutral. happen to think it's a good thing. You could think it's a bad thing. It's still going to be a thing. That Israeli resolve isn't going anywhere. The Israelis are watching Hezbollah like they never

watched before. The Israelis are watching the Iranians like they never watched before. No more monsters are going to be allowed to rise planning our destruction and genocide. No more 200,000 missiles buried under South Lebanon eager to set Tel Aviv on fire whenever the Ayatollahs of Iran give the order. No more. the Israelis will never again be fooled by Hamas. The Israelis, not the Arab world police forces or international stabilization forces or whoever ends up patrolling Gaza during the rebuilding, will be suppressing Hamas. And that gives me hope.

Because an alliance where everybody understands their role, the Saudis bringing a deradicalized curriculum because they actually want to push back on the insane warping of Islam that Hamas represents in their view. They de-radicalize their own curriculum in Saudi Arabia and they want to de-radicalize the curriculum in Gaza. The Israelis with the intelligence ops to suppress Hamas, America and Europe and the Gulf states with the money, the magnanimity, the sympathy,

the yearning to build that better Gaza to show that the whole purpose of the war, the Israelis also backing that to show that the purpose of the war was denotification and the rebuilding of Germany. and not the destruction of a people. This coalition, because the Israelis will still be doing the hard part, has a chance.

Everybody with their specific and unique contribution that no one else can offer, has a chance to detoxify, denotify, de-radicalize Gaza from the idea, from the narrative, from the story Hamas brings, that century-old story of the Muslim brothers, that has only ever destroyed everything it has ever touched in the Middle East. And that alliance, where everybody knows their role and nobody's pretending any more, has a chance to turn Gaza into that gas-rich Mediterranean Emirate

that a slightly less genocidal leadership would have made of it from the start. It's a whole new day. Everything could go wrong, but for the very first time in two years, everything could go right. That's the victory. Thank you so much for joining.