AGONIZING DILEMMA — Israel is now in its fourth day of carrying out sweeping airstrikes in Gaza, in retaliation for a massive surprise attack Saturday by Palestinian militants. As the government considers the scale and scope of its next response, Israel confronts an agonizing dilemma: how to deal with a hostage crisis that is inextricably linked to any prospect of a ground invasion. Over 150 Israelis — according to initial assessments from a senior Israeli military official — have been taken captive by Hamas. And while right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised to reduce parts of Gaza “into rubble” on Sunday, urging those living there to leave, any wide scale military operation could put those hostages at risk. Hamas has already promised to kill an Israeli hostage every time Israel bombs a Palestinian home without warning. Israeli leadership now has to calculate the impact of potential execution videos on the nation’s resolve, and to what lengths they’ll go to get the captive civilians — many of whom are women and children — back. Further complicating the situation, President Joe Biden confirmed today that there are American citizens among those captured by Hamas, and said, “As president I have no higher priority than the safety of Americans being held hostage around the world.” Italian, Thai and Austrian citizens — some of whom had dual citizenship with Israel — have also reportedly been taken captive. Since the bloody attacks began, death tolls have only mounted — at last count, in Israel more than 1,000 are dead and 2,600 others are wounded, while in Gaza at least 900 are dead and another 4,600 are wounded after Israeli air strikes. An ill considered response could result in those numbers skyrocketing. To better understand how the situation might unfold and what’s going on in Israeli war rooms right now, POLITICO Nightly spoke with Christopher Costa, a former U.S. Army intelligence officer who spent 25 years involved in counterintelligence and served as special assistant to the President and senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council from early 2017 to early 2018, focused in part on hostage response. Costa traveled to Israel many times in his career, meeting with the head of Mossad and Israel’s national security adviser, as well as with the President of the State of Palestine Mahmoud Abbas. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. What do planning meetings about how to deal with the hostage crisis look like right now? What’s likely happening right now is Israel is trying to develop intelligence to identify the locations of where hostages are being held. So at the highest levels of the Israeli government, they’re laying out their intelligence and asking: Do we have anything that’s predictable, continuous and thorough on where the hostages are being held? There is no plan for a rescue until you can identify where the hostages are. And I will say that this problem that the Israelis are dealing with is not like the Iranians holding Americans in one location in 1979. In that case, the United States was able to put together a rescue because all the hostages were held in one place. My conjecture is that’s not what Hamas would do — they would not consolidate hostages in one location. They would put them all over Gaza in different locations, probably underground. How might threats to kill hostages affect the Israeli government’s decision-making? When you start showing videos, hypothetically, of Israelis being killed as a reprisal for an Israeli strike that didn’t meet some kind of criteria: that Hamas was unaware of the strike or they were unable to move people (regardless, they’re not going to be honest brokers), then there’s going to be more pressure on the government. In a similar way, there was pressure on the United States to act when ISIS started beheading Americans in orange jumpsuits. It’s an emotional issue and passions are going to be unleashed on all sides of this fight by Israelis, and as well as Palestinians. Unbridled passion. I should say that there are gonna be some in the world that will celebrate Hamas as freedom fighters, and anybody that studies intelligence knows that that’s nonsensical. Hamas is a terrorist organization, by any definition. They have targeted and killed civilians. That is terrorism: targeting non combatants, civilians, children, women; they took hostages, they killed civilians. And Hamas has to be held accountable like a terrorist organization. So I don’t know how this is going to end. But I do know that it poses the ultimate strategic dilemma for Israel. I will say, there is hope that there are brokers in the region that can start to have communications with Hamas, like the Qatari government — they have a relationship, they can start talking to Hamas. Those aren’t going to be direct Israeli talks. But they certainly have a track record of de-escalating problems in the region, and they brokered with Afghanistan. So there is some diplomatic outreach that could play out, but the Israelis have to consider diplomatic, intelligence, military rescue responses, and they have to worry about the long term and the calculus of Iran as well. All of that has to be factored into the decision making. How long will it take the government to get a better count of the hostages? It’s hard to say, it’s hard for me to even conjecture. I think Israel is doing the math. And that might sound insensitive. But they’re doing the math based on witnesses that survived and identifying the bodies and interviewing witnesses. So I would say, in the next couple weeks, if not quicker than that, there will be a better accounting. Do you have the sense of what the coming days and weeks and months will look like on the ground? I want to see the West Bank stay stable. I want to see the Palestinian Authority step up. I want to caution Israeli settlers in the West Bank to remain calm. Terrorists want to cause an overreaction. Passions have come unleashed. So what I want to see is a proportional response, that destroys Hamas leadership and rank and file to the extent they can, just like the U.S. went after al Qaeda. And yet, I want to see a limited response so that civilians, to the extent that they can be protected, can be protected. The problem is, Hamas will hide among civilians. The worst case scenario is Iran and Syria get involved more directly, or Hezbollah in the north. That’s what I’m very concerned with. But I think there are possibilities in the next 30, 60, 90 days, where this can be de-escalated. A lot depends on what Iran does. A lot depends on what happens in the north. I think this is likely going to be a protracted conflict over months, not weeks. That’s only my calculus. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com. Or contact tonight’s authors at cmchugh@politico.com or on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @calder_mchugh.
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