Three of the six Israeli hostages who were discovered Saturday in a tunnel under Rafah could’ve been freed in a ceasefire deal negotiated in July.

That’s according to an unnamed Israeli official who told Ynet that Israeli-American Hersh Goldberg-Polin was “on a list that Hamas had agreed to return” due apparently to his injured left arm, which was badly maimed by a grenade on October 7. Carmel Gat and Eden Yerushalmi, two Israeli women, were on the same list, the official said. “It could have been approved on July 2.”

But it wasn’t. Approved on July 2, I mean. Now all three of those innocents are dead, along with three others, shot at close range by Hamas as the IDF approached, suggesting the group’s remaining fighters may be predisposed to executing hostages rather than leaving them to be rescued.

That could be the wrong read. It seems plausible, though, or anyway possible. To the extent it’s true, it means Israel’s confronting the gravest of binary dilemmas: Move close enough to Yahya Sinwar’s ceasefire position to secure the release of the remaining abductees, or write them off as the sunk cost of pursuing Sinwar and eradicating what little’s left of Hamas’s formalized military capacity.

Here’s the brutal reality: Israel can’t stop Hamas from executing hostages. There’s no strategic genius — no fighting force elite enough — to prevent that outcome. If Hamas is holding hostages at gun point and intends to shoot them as Israeli troops advance (or as ceasefire negotiations fail), those hostages will die. The only way to prevent that is to agree to a ceasefire deal with Sinwar. And Benjamin Netanyahu ain’t gonna do that, if readers will forgive the momentary lapse into colloquialisms.

Upon hearing news of the latest hostage deaths, tens of thousands of Israelis poured into the streets to protest on Sunday and the country’s largest labor union called a strike for Monday. It was a spectacular show of voter disaffection and the largest public outcry against Netanyahu’s handling of the crisis since the war began nearly a year ago.

From a technical standpoint, the main sticking point is the Israeli troop presence in and around the Philadelphi Corridor, a proper noun for Gaza’s border with Egypt. You don’t have to be especially well informed on the conflict to understand why Netanyahu wants to keep troops there. And why Sinwar wants those troops gone. There’s only one way into or out of Gaza that doesn’t entail going through Israel and that’s the Philadelphi Corridor. Are you an arms trafficker who needs to get weapons to Hamas? You have to go through the Rafah crossing. Are you a Hamas member looking to flee? You have to go through the Rafah crossing. (Or you need to be one helluva swimmer.)

The IDF seized control of the crossing in May. Hamas — what’s left of it — wants the Israeli troop presence gone from the corridor. Netanyahu’s hell-bent on preserving it. So hell-bent, in fact, that he got into a shouting match with Yoav Gallant about it at a cabinet meeting last week. “[Given] two possibilities — keeping the IDF deployed on the Philadelphi Corridor or bringing home the hostages — you are deciding to stay on the Philadelphi Corridor. Does this seem logical to you?” Gallant demanded, of Netanyahu, according to a transcript of the meeting leaked to Channel 12 and subsequently documented by various global media outlets. “There are living (hostages) there!”

At the meeting, Netanyahu presented a troop map which, according to Gallant, differed from the one Israeli negotiators produced while discussing a ceasefire in Cairo. Then Netanyahu demanded a vote on his map. Except it wasn’t a real vote. Netanyahu’s map was a decree and implicit was the notion that everyone in attendance would rubber stamp it, even if that meant signing the death warrants of Israeli hostages. Gallant wasn’t prepared to accept that.

“Hamas won’t agree to it,” Gallant said, of the map. “So there won’t be [a ceasefire deal] and there won’t be any hostages released.” Netanyahu, being the cold, calculating autocrat that he is, said simply, “This is the decision.”

Gallant wouldn’t let it go. “The prime minister can indeed make all the decisions, and he can also decide to kill all the hostages,” he chided, eliciting gasps from the room. Gallant then told Netanyahu that in the end, Sinwar will dictate the terms anyway, so Israel might as well try to save the remaining hostages. Irritated, Netanyahu said he doesn’t take dictates, he issues them, and sticking to the current strategy of maximum pressure remains the “only way to make Sinwar fold.”

That was on Thursday. Although the timeline isn’t known precisely, at some point over the ensuing 24 hours Hamas shot the six hostages at close range and left their bodies in a nightmarish tunnel 65 feet under Rafah.

Cue the protests. Large protests. Protests demanding a ceasefire. Protests against what Gallant all but called a dictatorship when he lamented that since Benny Gantz quit the war cabinet (a day after the Yamam successfully extracted Noa Argamani from captivity in what the military said was a civilian neighborhood in Gaza), Netanyahu’s “running the negotiations on [his] own.” “We hear everything after the fact,” Gallant chided.

Netanyahu’s intransigence is, by every account, about political survival and, relatedly, shielding himself from legal peril. But one shouldn’t overlook the role of autocratic obduracy. I’ve said this again and again over the past year, and a majority of readers don’t understand it or else don’t want to concede it. Israel wasn’t a democracy in the first place, it’s an ethnonationalist security state that operates a de facto apartheid regime. But by now, which is to say with Netanyahu serving a sixth (non-consecutive) term in power thanks to the support of right-wing religious extremists, it’s a flagrant autocracy that’s treading perilously close to becoming a soft dictatorship. Israel isn’t safer as a result. Quite the opposite.

According to the Washington Post, the US is at wits’ end. “The United States has been talking to Egypt and Qatar about the contours of a final ‘take it or leave it’ deal that it plans to present to the parties in the coming weeks,” Yasmeen Abutaleb and John Hudson reported, describing the forthcoming proposal as “one that, if the two sides fail to accept it, could mark the end of the American-led negotiations.”

Gallant on Sunday pleaded on behalf of the hostages. “The political-security cabinet must convene immediately and reverse the decision made on Thursday,” he said on social media, referencing the cabinet meeting chronicled above. “It is too late for the hostages who were murdered. We must return home the hostages who remain in the captivity of Hamas.”

Netanyahu was cold. “Those who murder hostages do not want a deal,” he said, before making his priorities clear enough. “We will pursue you, we will find you and we will settle accounts with you,” he told Sinwar.

Rest in peace to the hostages. The dead and the living.