Retired Shin Bet hostage negotiator Adi Rotem confirmed on Saturday that he held direct talks in 2024 with Ghazi Hamad, a senior Hamas political bureau member based in Beirut, in a channel that fed into the hostage deal completed in January 2025. Rotem said the shift to direct contact followed Hamas's killing of six hostages that August, among them Hersh Goldberg Polin, Ori Danino, Eden Yerushalmi, Almog Sarusi, Alexander Lobanov and Carmel Gat. It was clear, he said, that we had to try a different approach.
Rotem said the channel was approved by then Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar, who obtained political clearance from Netanyahu, the war cabinet and the security cabinet before it opened. The talks continued through the killing of Yahya Sinwar on 16 October 2024, and produced the release of 25 living hostages in the deal's first phase before Bar was removed from the negotiations in February 2025. A second, US backed agreement completed the remaining releases in October 2025.
Rotem was blunt about the relationship itself, telling Hamad directly that we are enemies at a time of war, we will continue to fight, even as the two men negotiated. He was harsher about Qatar's role as mediator, saying Doha had the same interests as Hamas and was acting in bad faith, and describing it as a Muslim Brotherhood state that has done strategic damage to Israel.
A retired officer confirming a secret channel a year and a half after it mattered most tells Israelis something the ceasefire's outcome already implied: that direct contact with Hamas, approved at the highest level despite the government's public posture against negotiating with it, is what produced the releases the public actually saw.