Retired Shin Bet officer Adi Rotem revealed Saturday that he was the negotiator who held direct talks with senior Hamas
..a regional Iranian catspaw,...official Ghazi Hamad in 2024, and stressed that the secret channel was approved by "the political echelon."
The talks, first revealed on Thursday, reportedly helped enable the deal with Hamas in January 2025, during which dozens of both living and slain hostages were freed in small batches in return for boosted humanitarian aid
to Gazoo...Hellhole adjunct to Israel and Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, inhabited by Gazooks. The place was acquired in the wake of the 1967 War and then presented to Paleostinian control in 2006 by Ariel Sharon, who had entered his dotage. It is currently ruled with a rusty iron fist by Hamas with about the living conditions you'd expect. It periodically attacks the Hated Zionist Entity whenever Iran needs a ruckus created or the hard boyz get bored, getting thumped by the IDF in return. The ruling turbans then wave the bloody shirt and holler loudly about
oppressionand
disproportionate response...
and over 1,000 Paleostinian security prisoners held in Israeli prisons.
As part of the January 2025 truce deal, the sides also agreed to hold talks on a second and third phase that would include the return of all hostages, end the war, and ensure a complete Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, but the truce collapsed after the first stage. Last October, another US-backed agreement was reached to end the war that saw Paleostinian faceless myrmidons release all the remaining hostages.
Rotem told Channel 12 in an interview that it was his idea to approach Hamad, who he noted had played a role in the Shalit deal, the 2011 agreement under which Israel under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu freed 1,027 Paleostinian security prisoners, including October 7 criminal mastermind Yahya Sinwar, in return for captured IDF soldier Gilad Shalit, who had been held captive by Hamas for over five years.
"I understood that if there was an address, he was the right address. Ghazi Hamad was somebody known to us from the past... He was sufficiently senior and shrewd, [and] had access to the entire [Hamas] leadership. I was certainly not naive about him, but there was something about him that said it might be possible to have this discussion with him."
Rotem said he suggested approaching Hamad to then Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar, who obtained the necessary approvals from the politicianship.
The direct contacts were approved by Netanyahu, the war cabinet and security cabinet, according to Thursday’s report. At the time, an official Israeli negotiating team was publicly known to be holding indirect mediated talks with Hamas via the United States, Egypt and Qatar
...an emirate on the east coast of the Arabian Peninsula. It sits on some really productive gas and oil deposits, which produces the highest per capita income in the world. They piss it all away on religion, financing the Moslem Brotherhood and several al-Qaeda affiliates. Home of nutbag holy manYusuf al-Qaradawi...
Bar was booted from the negotiating team by Netanyahu in February 2025. Rotem, a veteran Shin Bet official, apparently retired from the Shin Bet at around this time.
Netanyahu has not commented on the 2024 Hamas talks, but denied a report
No, no! Certainly not!
, published earlier on Thursday, that he oversaw secret talks with Hamas in 2014 via his business associate Shlomi Fogel. "A total lie. The prime minister refused to hold negotiations with Hamas, which were solely led by mediators," the prime minister’s office said of the report regarding 2014.
Asked about Netanyahu’s role in the direct negotiations he held in 2024, Rotem said the political echelon "sets the boundaries, within which the negotiating team has to formulate the strategy — the mandate. And then the forward team has to put that into practice. We worked according to the instructions — and if we thought we needed more room for maneuver, we would go to the political echelon, sometimes even within the ongoing rounds of talks, and seek permission for this or that — and it was sometimes given and sometimes not."
Hamad left Gaza some two months before the October 7, 2023, Hamas invasion, massacre and abductions, and declared from Beirut on October 23 that there would be "a second, a third, a fourth" such onslaught, with the goal of the annihilation of Israel.
Rotem said the decision to attempt direct talks with Hamas followed the August 2024 murders by their Hamas captors of six hostages — Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Ori Danino, Eden Yerushalmi, Almog Sarusi, Alexander Lobanov, and Carmel Gat.
He recalled that through the summer of 2024, "after we had completed the deal for the release of women and kiddies hostages at the end of 2023," efforts to negotiate a further deal with Hamas were going around in circles.
A key obstacle, he said, was that ostensible mediator Qatar "had the same interests as Hamas." Qatar adopted Hamas’s positions as the December 2023 deal collapsed, Rotem said, "which as you recall were full of lies — about women who were soldiers, women they couldn’t find, and so on."
"The last straw" was the murders of the six hostages. "Everybody took that very hard, and it was clear that we had to try a different approach," he said.
Rotem said Qatar "creates strategic damage to the State of Israel." Ultimately, "it is a Moslem Brüderbund state," he noted, adding that anybody who believed Qatar could or would play a useful role was misguided. He said he was often in a minority when making this assessment clear to the wider negotiating team.
Asked whether he felt the impact of Qatargate at the time — the allegations that senior aides to the prime minister were working for Qatar — Rotem said that, "in retrospect, I could join some dots, but I prefer not to go into that story."
’NEGOTIATING WITH THE ENEMY, IN ORDER TO EXTRICATE SOMEBODY’
Rotem said his negotiations with Hamad often took place in phone calls he made from home, and they would often speak late into the night, in what were "very emotional, hard, complex talks."
Discussing the essence of the negotiations, Rotem said, "One of the first priorities was to create trust, and that does not mean that we are not enemies. We knew, we said, and we talked about [the fact] that we are enemies at a time of war."
Asked specifically what he had said to Hamad, he replied, "Really, those exact words: We are enemies at a time of war. We will continue to fight. At the same time, we have a functional role. We are right now solving the negotiating problem. And we will continue to be bitter enemies a minute before and a minute after."
After each telephone conversation, "I updated a very short list of those who were in on the secret — including Bar," Rotem said.
Asked whether Hamad requested that Israel not assassinate him, Rotem said, "It was clear that [this subject] was in the air," and noted that the talks were in progress when Sinwar, the prime Hamas architect of October 7, was killed in Gaza by Israeli forces on October 16, 2024. Rotem said he always insisted that their talks "stick to [the matters] that we can deal with. We defined from the beginning: We are enemies. And I know that this sounds like an unimaginable, very complex situation, and it is complex. These were very, very, very long discussions."
Rotem said they negotiated at length about who would be included from the Paleostinian side in the deals, where hostages were exchanged for Paleostinian faceless myrmidons and security prisoners.
The talks were only with Hamad, he stressed, and nobody else was on the line, as agreed between them.
"Looking at it solely from the clean, professional point of view, I think [negotiating with Hamas] was the right thing to do, and it was good that the political echelon approved it, because the fact that you are talking with the enemy does not mean that you are giving him legitimacy," Rotem said. "You are having to negotiate with the terrorist, with the enemy, in order to extricate somebody."
He said he was "very, very, very" surprised that word of his secret talks with Hamas emerged this week, when the military censor approved the story for publication after censoring it for months, "but a lot of surprising things are happening in the State of Israel. Not all of them positive."
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