Israeli ex-negotiator: Gaza war could have ended a year sooner with hostages freed

Major General Nitzan Alon spent the opening months of the Gaza war as Israel's chief negotiator for hostage releases. What he saw in those early conversations, he now says, was a path to ending the conflict that his government chose not to take. Speaking at a Washington Institute for Near East Policy event on Friday marking three years since the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack, Alon made a stark claim: a deal to free all Israeli captives could have been reached roughly a year before it actually was, in October 2025, without sacrificing any of Israel's core military objectives.

"I think that we could have gotten to this point much earlier, maybe a year earlier or so, without any major implication on the other strategic goals of the war," Alon said. "We missed it, actually. The war was too long." He was direct about what that delay cost. Some of the hostages who eventually came home in the October 2025 prisoner exchange—which freed 20 Israeli captives and nearly 2,000 Palestinians held in Israeli jails—did not come home alive. They died in captivity during months when, in Alon's assessment, a ceasefire was negotiable.

The retired general took aim at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's insistence on achieving "total victory" before any deal could be struck. Alon called this framing false. The October 2025 ceasefire, he argued, was itself a strategic success—it has substantially degraded Hamas's military capacity—and it could have been secured much sooner. "We could have and we should have shortened the war, brought all the hostages back, maybe a year earlier, and moved forward and maybe saved thousands of lives on both sides," he told the panel.

Alon's assessment aligns with what other Israeli officials have begun saying publicly. Former diplomat Alan Pinkas told Al Jazeera on Friday that a settlement was possible almost immediately after the October 2023 attack. "A deal was possible very soon after the Hamas attack in October 2023," Pinkas said. "It took almost two years before the hostages were returned, so it's not just a missed opportunity, it's tragic." That timeline is corroborated by Qatar's Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani, who said this week that Israeli officials rejected a Hamas proposal for a limited ceasefire and hostage release on the first day after the attacks. Doha had reached out to Israeli leadership immediately with a clear message: Hamas was willing to open a window for civilians and captives to leave. The Israelis, according to Al Thani, were not interested in engaging with the idea.

Alon also criticized Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, saying in July that Smotrich had opposed various agreements proposed at different stages and therefore could not claim credit for the eventual hostage return. The comments come less than a month before Israel's October 27 legislative election, though analysts suggest they are unlikely to shift the outcome. Polls already reflect deep public anger over the Netanyahu government's failure to prevent the October 7 attack in the first place—a fury that has been further stoked by reports, including one from the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, suggesting that Israeli leadership had advance warning of a possible attack. Netanyahu has threatened to sue over that reporting, calling it fabricated and false. What remains clear is that the question of whether the war could have ended sooner, and at what cost in lives, will shadow Israeli politics as voters head to the polls.