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Escalating disagreements on how the Israeli government should proceed to release detainees in the Gaza Strip have dominated the Israeli media’s coverage, with options ranging between continuing warfare or engaging in negotiations with the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas). A member of the Israeli Knesset warned that calls for new elections could lead to civil war. Channel 11 quoted Eris Haim, a mother of one of the detainees, expressing her disdain for what she termed the “continuation of hate broadcasting.” She noted that the intensity of the disputes at the detainee’s families’ headquarters has reached a level where “if people had weapons there, the situation could have ended very badly.”
Mirav Sperisky, the sister of an Israeli detainee, believes that the ongoing fighting in Gaza poses a risk to her brother. She urges the government to “initiate an agreement that brings back all the abducted now because every moment they spend there is a danger to their lives.” Additionally, Eyal Ben Reuven, a former deputy commander of the Northern region, emphasized the need to prioritize the issue of the detainees’ release and consider all proposals, even the “very painful” ones. He stressed that a price must be paid for the grave failure that occurred on October 7. “The handling of the Hamas issue is ongoing, but if, God forbid, the kidnapped do not return, Israeli society will not be able to function,” he said.
Moshe Ya’alon, a former Minister of Security, believes the issue should have been addressed a long time ago, stating that neither pressure from their side nor the ground operation will make Hamas ready to release the abductees, as they did not take them to be “muted in tunnels or killed by us, but to exchange for their prisoners.” He suggests that if the government had made a serious proposal beforehand, “the abducted could have been released,” and asserted that “we might reach a ceasefire, and resume fighting if necessary, but the release of the kidnapped must be given high priority.”
In response to what might happen in case a call for new elections is made due to the increasing disapproval of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government, Likud party Knesset member Hanoch Milbetski warned that everyone would lose, and crises would be magnified, cautioning that it could lead to “the outbreak of a civil war.”
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