Israel’s top hostage negotiator on dealing with Hamas

Twelve years ago David Meidan, an Israeli intelligence officer, found himself standing just metres away from one of Israel’s most-wanted enemies. Across the corridor of the Egyptian intelligence headquarters in Cairo, he had caught a glimpse of Ahmed Jabari, then the military leader of Hamas. Meidan was in Cairo to try to secure the release of Gilad Shalit, a young Israeli corporal captured by Hamas in 2006. Israeli law forbade him from talking directly to Jabari – Egyptian intelligence officers shuttled messages between his room and the adjacent one where the Palestinian delegation were. Meidan remembers thinking Jabari looked tough.

Shalit had been imprisoned by Hamas for five years by the time Meidan was given the file in April 2011. Israeli intelligence agents had tried in vain to work out where he was or which unit within Hamas was holding him. An earlier attempt to start negotiations on Shalit’s release through German mediators had sputtered out. When Meidan started his mission he asked Egyptian intelligence which members of Hamas he ought to be talking to. They advised him to focus on Jabari. Hamas’s military leader, Meidan realised, was calling the shots, not the group’s “leaders in suits and ties” residing in “fancy hotels” in Qatar. It was Jabari, Meidan eventually learned, who was Shalit’s jailer. Within six months the young corporal was released, in exchange for 1,027 Palestinian prisoners.

When you’re dealing with a shadowy group like Hamas, Meidan explained to me in a bustling café just outside Tel Aviv last Friday, finding the right channel of communication is everything. “You have to find the right mediators. You have to gain their trust.”

His phone buzzed constantly as we talked. He left Mossad, Israel’s foreign-intelligence agency, in 2012 and went into the private-security industry. But since the massacres of October 7th, in which Hamas attacked Israel, killed 1,400 people and took at least 240 hostage, he has been volunteering around the clock to help free the captives. American diplomats, who are trying to get back their own citizens, are in frequent contact with him. Old colleagues in the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) and Mossad seek his advice. His main task at the moment, however, is acting as an informal consultant to the families of the hostages.

“Whenever a family calls my phone I answer immediately, even if it’s the middle of the night,” he said. Mostly he ignored the buzzing during our four-hour meeting, but on several occasions he glanced at the number and said it was one he had to take, then turned his back to me and spoke quietly.

Quiet and unfailingly polite, Meidan is committed to the idea that Israel has a moral duty to get back any citizen who is captured. Before the current crisis he was doing pro bono work on a campaign to free an Ethiopian-Israeli citizen with suspected mental illness who wandered into Gaza in 2014.

The hostages seized by Hamas on October 7th must be brought home “at all costs”, Meidan said. “Even if Israel must pay a heavy and painful price of opening its prisons and releasing all the 6,000 Palestinian terrorists.” This uncompromising attitude could make him unpopular with the government of Binyamin Netanyahu. The prime minister did not even meet the families of the hostages until three weeks into the crisis. After public pressure from the families (and prompting from former security officials in private), he has now declared the release of the hostages to be a priority.

Though they once worked together reasonably smoothly, Meidan and Netanyahu have bad blood between them. Earlier this year Meidan was rallying protests against the prime minister’s proposals to weaken Israel’s judiciary, which the former Mossad officer saw as a threat to Israeli democracy. He blames Netanyahu for failing to prevent the catastrophe of October 7th; it is only when discussing the prime minister that his usual air of intellectual detachment gives way to something angrier and more emotional. Every week he posts satirical poems about Netanyahu on social media. “Evasive and tricky, he refuses to take responsibility,” reads one. “People are on fire.”

Meidan was born In Cairo in 1955. His father ran a textile business which supplied ties to the Egyptian army. Gamal Abdel Nasser had just come to power and was launching fiery diatribes against Israel and the West. Meidan’s parents decided to move to Tel Aviv. “No one asked us to leave but like many Jews we felt that the ground was burning under our feet. The atmosphere was tense and unpleasant.”

He studied Arabic in high school, which he later perfected at Tel Aviv University, where he read Arabic and Middle East studies (his Egyptian dialect is so good he has been mistaken for a native speaker).

As a young intelligence officer in the 1980s Meidan was posted to Cyprus, where he cultivated sources in Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). In 1985 he helped thwart a PLO attack on a Tel Aviv beach. After successfully running agents across the Middle East for 20 years he was appointed to a senior role in the intelligence agency, working on clandestine initiatives to win the friendship of Arab regimes in the Gulf (such initiatives were often accompanied by the supply of high-tech Israeli spyware).

One sunny morning in April 2011 Meidan was attending a graduation ceremony for Mossad’s senior commanders when the organisation’s chief whispered in his ear: “Go immediately to Jerusalem.” Netanyahu wanted him to take over the efforts to free Shalit.

The difficulties that Meidan faced negotiating for just one prisoner offer some insight into how hard it will be to free more than 200. First he had to find a channel for meaningful communication with Hamas. The psychological profiles of the organisation’s leaders drawn up by Israeli intelligence were not very helpful. (“No offence, but what I read didn’t help me in my efforts to understand the true nature of who I was dealing with.”) On his first day in the job, an Israeli peace activist called Gershon Baskin asked for a meeting. Baskin said that he had a contact in Hamas who could connect him to the group’s military leadership.

Baskin had approached the previous two envoys working on Shalit’s release, but they had rebuffed him – he was seen as a naive daydreamer. Meidan, however, was inclined to be open-minded. “A good intelligence officer needs to know how to observe, to listen, to remember, and not to be dragged into emotional bias,” he explained. Meidan started to exchange messages through Baskin’s contact and it seemed that they were being passed on to Jabari, Hamas’s military commander. At first the messages were just brief texts. Then they developed. Hamas even took to wishing the Israeli “good night” at the end of the day.  As the communication grew more substantive, Meidan gave Baskin access to a fax machine.

The Baskin channel helped establish Meidan’s negotiating initiative as a serious one in the eyes of Hamas. “Trust is gained step by step in small, tiny moves,” he said.

Soon afterwards, Meidan had the Egyptians set up a meeting with Jabari in Cairo. Jabari was afraid the Israelis would kill him as he drove across the Sinai desert to the Egyptian border, and asked for assurances he would be protected.

Initially the atmosphere at the meeting wasn’t promising. Jabari, hardened by 13 years in Israeli jail, was obdurate and uncompromising. “His demands were endless.” The Egyptians sought to soften him with small luxuries. They even took him to the cinema for the first time. Meidan meanwhile worked to establish himself as someone who could be relied on to “stick to the understandings and agreements reached”. Over the course of several mediation sessions, the negotiations inched forward from the principles of a deal to the names of which prisoners would be released.

This, Meidan recalled, was the toughest part of the process. Several of the men on Hamas’s list had been involved in killing Israelis. Meidan at least had the advantage of knowing in advance what Jabari was going to ask for because Israel was eavesdropping on Hamas’s communications. ‘We always knew what his next move would be,” he said.

Netanyahu was under a lot of pressure domestically at this point. Unprecedented protests about the rising cost of living in Israel had broken out that summer. In the end Meidan was authorised to offer over 1,000 prisoners for Shalit, including some controversial ones (Yahya Sinwar, now the head of Hamas in Gaza, was on the list). In October 2011 Meidan flew in a private jet to Cairo to sign the deal.

Even then it nearly fell apart at the last minute. Jabari signed the document first, which was in Arabic. Meidan says that when he read through it before adding his own signature he noticed that some lines that had been agreed on were missing. He refused to sign and accused Hamas of cheating. The Egyptian intelligence officers went to talk to Jabari. After  two nerve-racking hours the Hamas team agreed to reinstate the lines, and the agreement was signed. “Of course, we experienced moments of anger and frustration, but we never threatened,” said Meidan. “I don’t believe in threats.”

A week later Jabari and the Egyptian intelligence officers escorted Shalit to the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt. Meidan and his team were waiting for him in an old Israeli military car. One of the Egyptian officials laughed and suggested Shalit and Meidan might be more comfortable driving to the Israeli border in his Mercedes, which they ended up doing. From the border Shalit and Meidan were flown in an Israeli military helicopter to an air-force base. When the helicopter door opened Meidan was astonished to see Netanyahu waiting for the fragile young soldier, together with a hastily assembled press corps. It had been too good a photo opportunity for the prime minister to pass up.

In October 2012 Meidan was asked to talk about his experiences as a hostage negotiator to students at Tel Aviv University, his alma mater. He told them, among other things, that Netanyahu’s domestic political troubles had played a role in leading him to accept Hamas’s extraordinarily high demands. Somehow, the master spy failed to consider the possibility that someone might be recording the session. It leaked to the press and Netanyahu was furious. Meidan had been tipped to be the next leader of Mossad, but Netanyahu would have to approve his nomination. Knowing he now had no chance of progressing further he resigned. His intelligence career was over.

A year after Shalit’s release Israel assassinated Ahmed Jabari in a missile strike as he drove through Gaza city. “It was wrong,” Meidan told me.

The effort to free the October 7th hostages is spread across different organisations. One is the IDF, which is gathering intelligence, planning rescue operations and, selectively, sharing information with the hostages’ relatives. The families have formed a committee so they can work together to get publicity and press the government. The majority of them want attacks on Gaza to stop until their relatives are home, although a minority support the bombardment. Netanyahu has also appointed an envoy for the hostages. Both Qatar and Egypt are reported to be involved in attempts to mediate their release.

When the hostages’ relatives call him, Meidan gives them the same piece of advice: “separate noises from sounds”. Many people are offering to help get the hostages out of Gaza. Some are well-intentioned; some, as Meidan puts it, are “charlatans”. He believes time is critical if a number of the hostages are to survive and investing too much time and energy in the wrong channels could be costly. The families need to “concentrate and find the right mediators, whether it’s Qatar, Egypt or Turkey”, said Meidan. “Don’t look for too many avenues.

”When he was negotiating the Shalit exchange, he always opposed the idea of dividing the deal into different phases. Now, because of the sheer scale of the hostage-taking, he thinks differently. “If we cannot have an entire deal let’s do it gradually, women and children first, in order to establish trust.”

Even after all the blood that has been shed in the past three weeks, Meidan believes trust can and must be established between Israel and Hamas’s hostage negotiators. Yuval Diskin, a former head of the Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security service, who has worked with Meidan on the ongoing attempt to release the Ethiopian-Israeli, says it is this capacity for “creative thinking” that makes Meidan such an effective negotiator. “He understands the full range of Arab culture, and above all is a mensch.”

Meidan has suspended public campaigning against Netanyahu, but plans to resume it once the war ends. We said goodbye amid the hiss of coffee machines, the distant explosion of Iron Dome defences intercepting rockets from Gaza and the endless vibrating of his mobile phone. I asked him what he’d learned from the Shalit negotiations. “Clinch a deal as fast as you can,” he said. “Because it might be too late.” ■

Yossi Melman is a defence and security analyst for Haaretz

ILLUSTRATIONS:  MICHELLE THOMPSON

SOURCE IMAGES: HADAS PARUSH/ HAARETZ, getty, ilya mElinkov/ynet, gpo