Hamas has at least two core objectives in the war it inaugurated. The first is to survive it, and the second is to preserve its leadership structure, much of which is ensconced in lavish conditions in Doha provided by their Qatari hosts. The hostages the terrorist sect seized on October 7 are crucial to both goals. Drawn-out negotiations over the status of its captives secures Hamas’s position in Qatar while prolonging the war, giving Hamas the opportunity to impose costs on the Israelis sufficient to force Jerusalem to abandon its goal of neutralizing the terrorist regime in Gaza.
The president has repeatedly and nonsensically claimed that Hamas would willingly negotiate itself out of existence. That never made any sense, but Joe Biden seemed committed to it. Today, though, Hamas has once again demonstrated that it is not a good-faith negotiator. In its formal and irritatingly belated response to a peace plan Biden has spent weeks drumming up support for, Hamas demonstrated that it will not trade away the only leverage it has.
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