Hamas has supposedly agreed to release all of the hostages. If this indeed comes to pass, it will be one of the most remarkable and long-awaited turns in this entire war. But alongside the joy and relief comes an unavoidable question: why now?
Hamas has built its entire negotiating position around the hostages. Each one represented leverage. Each one was meant to tie Israel’s hands, to force concessions, to drag out international talks. Releasing them all, in one stroke, goes against everything Hamas has calculated since October 7 and everything it has pursued in the months since.
Perhaps this question should be left unanswered.
The answer is unlikely to be found in Israel’s military pressure alone, though that has certainly mattered the most. Hamas has been battered, Gaza has been flattened, its senior commanders eliminated. But if battlefield losses were enough to break Hamas’s will, this would have happened much earlier. What appears to be happening now is different. Hamas is not caving to Israel, but to the Arab world - to the pressure of Qatar, Egypt, and others who finally decided to exert real weight.
This reality begs the next question: if the Arab states had the ability to push Hamas this far, why did they wait until now? Why did it take nearly two years of suffering on both sides and countless international crises before that pressure was brought to bear?
If the reports are accurate, it means that the keys were in Arab hands all along. Qatar has served as Hamas’s patron and financial lifeline. Egypt has controlled the Rafah crossing and positioned itself as an essential mediator. Other Arab capitals have maintained their own influence. And yet, for months and months, all we heard was that the situation was “delicate,” that more time was needed, that Hamas could not be forced into concessions.
But what if that was never really true? What if the truth is that Hamas could have been compelled to release the hostages much earlier, had the Arab world made the decision to bring its leverage to bear? What if Qatar and others held out hope that they could somehow defeat Israel through international pressure? This possibility is as frustrating as it is infuriating. It would mean that hundreds of days of anguish were avoidable, that the endless “talks about talks” were largely a charade, and that hostage families and ordinary Palestinian Arabs were forced to suffer because regional politics came before human lives.
It also lays bare how decisive Qatar is in this story. Once Qatar chooses to act, things move. And once Qatar withholds action, things stall. In reality this makes Qatar not just a mediator and not just a power broker of the first order, but the actual de-facto leader of Hamas itself. This is a truth that is perhaps too hard to confront right now, but should be grappled with in the future.
None of this diminishes the magnitude of what could be unfolding right now. The return of the hostages would be one of the most emotional, unifying, and redemptive moments in Israel’s modern history. It would be a vindication of Netanyahu’s desire for total victory as defined by a complete return of the hostages, an end to Hamas rule as well as a disarmament of Hamas ( as laid out in the 20 point plan).
It is also a moment to recognize the individuals who worked tirelessly behind the scenes. Credit is due to President Donald Trump and his team, whose influence is unmatched around the world; to Jared Kushner, whose groundwork during the Abraham Accords continues to shape Arab-Israel dynamics; to Netanyahu and Ron Dermer who withstood immense pressure to cave on their strategy for victory, and of course to the moderate Arab states who united to pressure Hamas.
But gratitude must not blind us to the lesson. This moment proves that Hamas alone was never the true obstacle - it was always its protectors. The Arab world had the ability to end this horror but chose to delay for their reasons.
Ecclesiastes 3:1 states: “To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven”. There are deep questions that loom in the distance but perhaps now the best thing to do is to rejoice in the possible end of this war and to ask question later.
Daniel Rosen is the Co-founder of a Non-profit Technology company called Emissary4all which is an app to organize people to move the needle on social media and beyond. . He is the Co-host of the podcast "Recalibration". You can reach him at drosen@emissary4all.org