Today, Explained - The hostage deal (brought to you by Qatar)

Episode Date: November 27, 2023

After 50 days of the Israel-Hamas war, both sides took a breather to save lives. And it couldn’t have happened without Qatar. This episode was produced by Victoria Chamberlin and Isabel Angel, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and Amanda Lewellyn, engineered by Rob Byers and Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It was a very big weekend for the war between Israel and Hamas, but for the first time in 50 days of fighting, it wasn't because of killing. Old ladies were being saved. Little kids were being safe. Palestinian prisoners were coming home. Thai farmers were going home. And coming up on today explained none of this would have been possible were it not for Qatar. Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings.

Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit Superstore.ca to get started. You're listening to Today Explained. Tia Goldenberg is an Associated Press reporter based in Tel Aviv. She joined us this morning for the latest on these hostage deals. We started with October 7th. So at 6.30 in the morning on October 7th, slowly reports come in that hundreds of Hamas militants have blasted their way out of the Gaza Strip and have rampaged through communities in southern Israel. Harrowing images we are seeing on social media of bodies,

both Israeli civilians and soldiers in the streets. And they've gone door to door essentially in these quiet communal farming communities and have either killed people, there are about at least 1200 people killed, and they take 240 people captive. There are both Israeli soldiers and Israeli civilians who have been taken captive inside of Israel and then taken back over the border into Gaza. And they are now in captivity under the control of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad inside of Gaza. We're talking about men, women, children, the elderly, hostages as young as nine months old and as old as, you know, late 80s. And they're dragged into Gaza by golf cart, by motorcycle,

by car, by foot. And this sets off the war that we're currently seeing. And does negotiation for their release begin immediately? And if so, who is involved in those negotiations? The negotiations, according to our reports, begin shortly after, not quite immediately, but shortly after. And they're moderated by primarily Qatar, Egypt, and the United States. And they, pretty much two weeks into the war, really kick into high gear. And they've been working on this current truce since then. And it's come up in various iterations that either side has either, you know, pulled back from or rejected. But it was accepted last week on Wednesday. And that's what set off the current deal to get started on Friday. Tell us what exactly this deal is.

So Hamas and Israel agreed to a four-day truce. That would mean neither side is fighting. Israeli jets are not striking. Hamas is not firing rockets. In exchange for 50 hostages, 150 Palestinian prisoners, including some women and teenagers, will be released by Israel. The Red Cross will be given access to the hostages still held, while humanitarian aid will get to the people of Gaza, three to four hundred trucks a day

and fuel. On the side of this deal were deals negotiated by Thailand, which has a significant amount of its citizens who are working here, who were also taken captive. And it turns out that Russia also had a deal to release a dual Israeli-Russian citizen. What do we know about who's been freed so far? We're speaking 8 a.m. Monday morning East Coast time. So there have been three batches of hostage releases since Friday. We're talking about women and children primarily. They've mostly been released in kind of family batches. So you've had a mother, a grandmother, and a nine-year-old

who were freed altogether. You've had two sisters freed together. There was a four-year-old Israeli-American. She was actually three when she was taken captive, and she recently celebrated her fourth birthday in captivity. You know, her mom was killed in front of her when her kibbutz was attacked by Hamas terrorists on October 7th. Abigail ran to her dad then, who then was gunned down, gunned down as well, while using his body to shield little Abigail. And as I said, you've also seen Thai foreign nationals who were released, a Filipino caretaker who was living at one of these communal farms released.

And so in exchange for all of these hostages, Israel agreed to release about 150 Palestinians who are imprisoned in its jails. Israel imprisons about 7,000 Palestinians that it considers security prisoners. Now, as part of the deal, Israel agreed to release people who are in prison for mostly minor offenses. We're talking rock throwing. We're talking vague charges like terrorism affiliation. What condition were all of these hostages in, from the Israelis to the Palestinians to the Thais, the Filipino, the American? So in terms of the details about the hostages' conditions,

the hostages have been largely kept away from the public eye, but details are starting to emerge. She's lost a lot of weight from her face and body, but generally doing better than we expected. They've come out mostly in good physical condition, except for one woman who is being treated in hospital now for life-threatening issues that doctors say is because she wasn't treated properly in Gaza, and we don't have too many details on that. The families of the hostages

are saying they were kept in something like a reception room or a reception area. They used plastic chairs and pushed them together for beds. They were given meager amounts of food like bread and rice. And in some cases, some of the children came back and told their relatives that they were told to whisper and keep quiet. I spoke to a nephew of one of the hostages released who said that his aunt had to readjust to sunlight because she had been underground for so long

and couldn't get used to that amount of light. In terms of the Palestinian prisoners, Israel keeps these prisoners in jails where their conditions are, Israel says, humane. The Palestinians say that this isn't the case, that there's accusations that Israel, during interrogations, for instance, treats them inhumanely. Israel also uses this tactic called administrative detention, which allows it to hold prisoners without charge or due process, which means you have people languishing in jail

for an indeterminate amount of time based on intelligence that isn't publicly available. So, you know, all of the prisoners came out looking good in good physical condition. But obviously, there's criticism about the way Israel holds its prisoners. We haven't actually heard too much from the Thais yet at this point either. They're also in Israeli hospitals and are being sent back to Thailand. Obviously, there's going to be more negotiation about further hostage releases.

Do we know how many hostages remain and when they're going to get exchanged? Well, as part of this current deal, Israel and Hamas both left open the door to extend the truce. Israel says it'll hold fire for 24 hours, so long as Hamas releases 10 hostages a day. We know that after this current truce and the hostage releases, as well as some previous releases that were minor, there are now about 175 hostages still in Gaza. And initially there were 240. The people that remain, we don't know the exact figure. Hamas isn't saying who it's held. It isn't saying how many children. And there are still some people that Israel considers missing that it doesn't know whether they're in Gaza or dead.

So the estimation is there are about 40 children that Hamas and other militant groups held. A chunk of those have been released in this exchange, but there may still be more. There are women, there are young adults who are attending the music festival in southern Israel that got overrun by Hamas on October 7th. There are soldiers who are seen by Hamas as a key, key bargaining chip with Israel. And there are still elderly men and some elderly women who remain. You know, I've seen videos of hostages on both sides of this war being paraded through the streets like rock stars. People are cheering. There's motorcades. There's waving of Israeli flags. On the other side, there's waving of Hamas flags. Does this exchange help Hamas politically?

And on the other side, does it help Benjamin Netanyahu politically? Israel and Hamas have engaged in prisoner swaps in the past. Hamas has taken, famously in 2006, took the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit captive for five years and exchanged him for about a thousand Palestinians imprisoned in Israel. Not all Palestinians support Hamas, of course, but Palestinians cherish the people who are being held by Israel. They're seen as heroes. They're seen as fighting Israel's occupation. And for Hamas to achieve their release, which is essentially seen as the only way to get them out of Israeli prisons, that does bolster how Palestinians view Hamas in the West Bank and in Gaza.

In terms of Benjamin Netanyahu, Israelis are overwhelmingly behind freeing the hostages. They were deeply scarred by what happened on October 7th. And it's become a big rallying cry for Israelis to have all of the hostages freed. But when it comes to Benjamin Netanyahu, it's complicated. He was mired in criticism before the war started. And since the war started, his approval rating has just plummeted. So freeing the hostages, this doesn't necessarily help Benjamin Netanyahu,

who was struggling politically before in any case. But it does give Israelis a little bit more confidence in their security establishment that they can achieve the goals of this war. And of course, one of those stated goals, I think there's only two of them. One is get the hostages back. The other is destroy Hamas. But you just told us that this is seen as a huge win for Palestinians, that Hamas got all of these Palestinians back. How do you think that factored into the calculation here for the people negotiating this ceasefire and this hostage exchange for Qatar? I think that there was no way these hostages could stay in there much longer. And I

don't think Israel took that too much into account. Its stated goal is to destroy Hamas. And so I don't think Israeli negotiators care very much what this does to Palestinian public opinion. They want Hamas destroyed as their next step or eventual final step in this war. And so it was crucial for Israel to free the hostages, regardless of what that meant for Hamas's position. Tia Goldenberg is with the AP. We spoke with her Monday morning. Around noon, we got news that Israel and Hamas had agreed to extend their ceasefire for another two days. That news, of course, came from Qatari mediators. Qatar, when we're back on Today Explained comes from Aura.

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If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Today explained, Ramesh Verm, the most important player in these hostage negotiations has been Qatar, who you might best remember from last year's World Cup. We wanted to find out how they became the hostage negotiation VIP, so we got in touch with Joel Simon. I'm the founding director of the Journalism Protection Initiative at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. Before he ended up there, Joel spent 25 years at the Committee to Protect Journalists. And unfortunately, kidnapping is an occupational hazard for journalists. So Joel has spent decades thinking about hostages and hostage negotiation. He's written a book

about it, and he just wrote about Qatar's role in this war for the New Yorker. We asked him if people should be surprised to see Qatar at the center of these negotiations between Israel and Hamas. Well, I don't think they should be surprised if they've followed the hostage issue. And I admit we're a pretty small subset of people who think about this and look at this regularly. But the reality is that Qatar has been playing this role for, you know, 20 years. Every time there's kidnapping in, certainly in the Middle East, you know, the conduit for trying to negotiate the release was often through Doha in Qatar. So, you know, they've sort of seen this as part of a broader strategy of having relationships and being able to talk to all parties.

But, you know, they've been at the center of this for decades now, and they've been kind of developing their capabilities and building the relationships that are necessary to, you know, achieve success. How did they become, you know, positioned at the center of hostage negotiation? Qatar has sort of, as a kind of strategy to increase security from their perspective and gain influence and visibility in what they consider to be a volatile region, has sort of adopted this posture of active neutrality. You could sort of call it that.

And it's sort of, you could think of it as like, or they think of it, you know, as kind of the Switzerland of the Gulf. In Qatar's case, the defense is really the fact that it hosts the, you know, one of the largest U.S. military bases in the Middle East. And so that gives it a kind of, you know, a strong disincentive for regional adversaries to get too aggressive. And at the same time, what it tries to do is sort of position itself to have relationships with all parties. So it has a relationship with Iran, it's had relationships, or the ability to communicate, certainly, and some have alleged active support for jihadi groups that have been,

you know, that have been active in Syria and Iraq. It had relationships with the Taliban in Afghanistan. So when there were kidnapping and hostage taking carried out by the Taliban or the Haqqani Network, which is associated with the Taliban in Afghanistan, you know, the Qataris were the conduit through which you could resolve these cases. And they were very willing to play this role because it was consistent with their strategic vision and their sense that by having relationships with all parties, they could better protect their own security. And obviously, now that there is a deal, Qatar gets to be something of a hero. But this took weeks upon weeks, and thousands upon thousands of Gazans died in the interim.

How effective do you think they ultimately were? Oh, I think we really can't pin that on the Qataris at all. Depending on the version of the accounts that you hear, there was a deal in place on October 23rd. And I would say, based on my reporting, the Qataris were on this from day one. It's obviously an extremely complicated undertaking. And it was really, I mean, there's some dispute over who blew up the deal, but it blew up on October 25th. My Qatari sources, you know, kind of say that the Israelis were more intransigent. The final demand, they had a tentative deal in place to release 50 hostages, and the final demand, and by the way, that deal did not involve the release of Palestinian prisoners,

and it also did not involve a firm agreement for a ceasefire. It was more of an understanding that there would be a pause in hostilities to allow the transfer of hostages. So if you look at it from that perspective, it was actually a better deal for the Israelis, but the Israelis had a final demand, and that was that they wanted a list of all the hostages that would be released or that were being held. And the Hamas representative, the political representative who was leading the negotiation in Doha, basically said, that's going to take time. These hostages are scattered. Some are held by different groups, and we need to pause in the hostilities

in order to be able to collect those names and provide them to you. Well, the Israelis interpreted this as a stalling tactic, and they said, you know, no deal. This was October 25th, and literally within hours of that deal collapsing, the Israelis began the ground invasion and the disruption in communication. So, you know, the Israelis made a decision at that point that, you know, they were going to proceed with the military operation. And, you know, it took weeks and weeks for the hostage negotiations to get back on track. So it seems here being at the center of this international negotiation that the whole world is watching right now can really know, when I talk to my Qatari contacts, you know, they stress the humanitarian aspect of this, and I'm sure that that plays a role,

certainly for the people who are involved directly in the negotiation, you know, and supporting it, that's very satisfying to feel you're serving a humanitarian purpose. But that's not what guides states. States are guided by state interests, and you have to sort of probe and ask yourself, you know, why would a state do this? And I do believe that, you know, the Qataris have used different strategies to increase their visibility and influence around the world. These include things like subsidizing Al Jazeera, the regional broadcast Arabic language network that's based in Doha and is supported by the Qatari government. They've also, of course, you know, hosted international sporting events like the, you know, the World Cup. And, you know, they've spread their money all over the world.

And so they're always looking for strategies that increase their visibility and influence. And, you know, they're also involved. There's a history of regional tensions. And so they perceive their ability, you know, it's being useful, as one of the people I talked to for the New Yorker article described it to me, you know, being useful to great powers, being not just useful, but in some cases, indispensable, you know, for a small country, that's a pretty good position to be in. It's interesting to think about this country being friends with everybody, and what that would entail right now is being friends with both Hamas and Israel at a time where there couldn't be more enmity between those two groups. Yeah, well, I mean, that's what mediation is all about. And, I mean, I should point out that, you know,

hostage-taking is a cruel crime. And because I, I should point out that, you know, hostage taking is a cruel crime. And because I've been reporting on it for so many years, I've spoken to many people who've been taken hostage. I've spoken to the families, many, many, many families. It is truly a devastating experience. It's also a violation of international humanitarian law. But, you know, what I've seen over time is that it's such a horrible crime that governments engage in a kind of posturing. They say, we will not negotiate, we don't negotiate with terrorists. They get all, you know, kind of aggressive militarily, and they say, we're going to rescue the hostages, or we're going to solve this problem through military means. But the

reality is, hostage crises are not solved by sloganeering. They're not solved by military efforts, except in very rare occasions. They're solved by negotiation. That's how these hostage crises are resolved. And so you need a reliable interlocutor. They're talking to each other through intermediaries in order to resolve this crisis. It gives some glimmer of hope that that dialogue can lead to something deeper and more lasting that would somehow reduce the level of violence. I don't know if that's possible, but I do think that there's some glimmer of hope

which might not have existed before this deal was done. Joel Simon is the author of We Want to Negotiate the Secret World of Kidnapping, Hostages, and Ransom. Find it wherever you find your books. Our program today was produced by Victoria Chamberlain and Isabel Angel. They had help from Amina Alsadi, Laura Bullard, Amanda Llewellyn, Patrick Boyd, and Rob Byers. This is Today Explained. Thank you. you