Israeli official says Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar can leave Gaza with his family and end war if hostages are freed

Tel Aviv — Gal Hirsch, Israel’s coordinator for hostages and missing persons, extended the Israeli government’s ceasefire offer to Hamas leader Yahyah Sinwar.

“I think we’ll be able to provide safe passage for him, his family, whoever he wants to take with him. If he wants to take ten, let him take ten. Thousands! I don’t care,” Hirsch told CBS News.

In return, he said Hamas would have to give up control of the Gaza Strip and allow the return of the remaining 101 hostages.

“It would be the end of the war, because (the hostages) would be recovered,” Hirsch said.

Of the 101 hostages still held by Hamas, Israeli intelligence estimates that 64 are still alive. Israel insists that both the living and the dead must be returned.

Sinwar has not responded to Hirsch’s proposal since the Israeli negotiator first floated a more limited version of it last week.

The Hamas leader has been hiding, believed to be somewhere in the labyrinth of tunnels beneath Gaza, since the group launched its terror attack on Israel on October 7, killing some 1,200 people, taking about 250 others hostage and sparking the ongoing civil war. war in Gaza.

According to Israeli officials, Sinwar was last seen in a video allegedly captured by a Hamas security camera just days after the October 7 massacre. The grainy black-and-white footage shows him only from behind, following his wife and children into a tunnel.

Sinwar was named Hamas’s overall leader on August 6, about a week after Israel assassinated the group’s longtime political leader. Ismail Haniyeh in the Iranian capital, Tehran.

Sinwar issued a public message this week thanking his Houthi allies in Yemen after one of their missiles hit Israel on Sunday. Nothing in his message suggested that he was prepared to accept an Israeli offer of a safe exit from Gaza. Instead, he signaled that with the help of the Houthis and the powerful Hezbollah, Hamas’s ally in Lebanon, his group was prepared to hold out until an eventual victory over Israel.

“We have prepared for a protracted war of attrition that will break the political will of the enemy,” he said.

Hirsch also signaled in his CBS News interview that there may be some wiggle room in one of the key conditions Israel has set for a cease-fire deal with Hamas.

Two weeks ago, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was accused by Hamas of suddenly introducing a new term into the negotiations. He allegedly shifted a goalpost in the long-drawn-out dialogue by insisting that after the war, Israeli troops should remain in the Philadelphia Corridor, the area along Gaza’s southern border with Egypt, to ensure that Hamas could not smuggle weapons into the Palestinian territories.

For Hamas, any sustained Israeli military presence in Gaza has always been a failure in negotiations.

Hirsch has now hinted that there might be room for compromise.

“I deal with the hostages and the missing,” he said. “The Philadelphia road is a very important asset for the negotiations.”

Several senior Israeli military officials believe that monitoring of the alleged smuggling route could be carried out electronically, with the help of international partners, but without an Israeli presence on the ground.

Asked about the possibility of Israel relying on underground sensors rather than troops to detect contraband, Hirsch said the details of the IDF’s deployment – ​​which troops are stationed where – “are part of the negotiations.”

“The Philadelphia road, the prisoners in Israeli jails, the humanitarian aid: these are all assets with which we can negotiate to bring our hostages home,” he said.