Why Israel aims for arrangement with Hamas

Officially, Israel denies — or rather declines to confirm — reaching an agreement with Hamas last week.

Indeed, the issue was not brought to the security Cabinet. New Right leader Naftali Bennett and his party colleague Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked have been running an election campaign headlined “Bennett will defeat Hamas," calling for a harsh stance against the Gaza Strip escalating violence and criticizing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s policy on Hamas. But on April 1, Shaked conceded in an interview on Channel 13, “I have no idea whether there is an agreement with Hamas, I have not been updated.” Earlier, Shaked and Bennett had urged Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to convene the security Cabinet to discuss the reportedly emerging deal, saying they would vote against “Israel’s surrender to Hamas,” as Bennett described it.

That's the crux of the issue. An agreement with Hamas, whether concluded or signed, means that Israel has recognized the group de facto and no longer views it as a terror organization. That's probably why Netanyahu has avoided convening his Cabinet. However, what occurred March 30 along the Gaza border — with Hamas curbing violence against Israel — was obviously the result of understandings between the sides, a type of ad hoc Israel-Hamas arrangement mediated by Egypt on the way to a broader compact.

Israel and Hamas are not discussing a cease-fire or a prisoner swap, as states sometimes do with terror organizations. The United States, for example, made a deal with the Taliban for the 2014 release of captured soldier Robert Bergdahl without removing it from the list of terror-supporting organizations. Such was also the case with American journalist Peter Theo Curtis freed from captivity in Syria the same year by the jihadist group Jabhat al-Nusra, which the United States continues to view essentially as a terror organization.