Finding the body of the prisoner Youssef Al-Zayadna represents a pressure factor on the Israeli side because it confirms its inability to recover its prisoners alive by force, and exacerbates the internal crisis, according to political analysts Saeed Ziad and Suleiman Bisharat.
Earlier today, Wednesday, the occupation army announced that it had found the body of prisoner Al-Zayadna in a tunnel in the city of Rafah, south of the Gaza Strip, and said that it had found belongings belonging to Hamza (the son of the slain prisoner), which raises concerns about his fate.
The army and Shin Bet said, in a joint statement, that Al-Zayadna was captured on October 7, 2023, and was killed while in captivity.
While the army confirmed that it would continue to work to recover all the prisoners as soon as possible, Defense Minister Yisrael Katz said that the government “will make every effort to fulfill its commitment to recover all the kidnapped people, living and dead.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tried to consider the discovery of Al-Zayadna’s body an intelligence success, so he congratulated the army and Shin Bet on this operation, which was described as complex.
Intelligence failure
But Ziad says that recovering the bodies of the captured soldiers “is considered an Israeli failure and not a success, as the army and Netanyahu are trying to say, because this prisoner and others could have been recovered alive if Tel Aviv had not adhered to the issue of retrieving them by force.”
Finding the body of this prisoner reinforces the Israeli intelligence failure and confirms that restoring the rest of the prisoners alive “will only happen through an agreement, as happened in the first deal,” says Ziad.
At the present time, the resistance will not be able to provide any information regarding the living prisoners to the Israeli side unless Israel provides calm in the Gaza Strip and gives compensation to the residents who paid a heavy price, according to Ziad.
Without this calm, “the resistance will not be able to know the fate of the prisoners in Jabalia, for example, because they are being subjected to complete annihilation by the occupation forces,” according to Ziad.
The political analyst believes that stopping the war “has become a practical requirement in order to determine the fate of a large number of prisoners, about whom the resistance will never risk providing free information to any party under any pressure.”
Ziad concluded that finding Al-Zayadna’s body “is a card added to the resistance’s balance more than Israel’s because the Israelis will talk about how this prisoner could have been recovered alive, which means more pressure on the Israeli negotiator, not the Palestinian.”
The Israeli Prisoners’ Families Association said that the agreement being discussed “will come too late for Youssef Al-Zayadneh, who should have returned alive to his family.”
A shock to the Israeli street
The commission stressed that “the time has come to create conditions for the return of all the living abductees for rehabilitation and the dead for a proper burial,” while Maariv newspaper quoted the father of one of the prisoners as saying that the news of the recovery of Al-Zayadna’s body “is evidence that the fighting will not return the kidnapped.”
These positions – according to political analyst Suleiman Bisharat – reflect the great impact that the recovery of bodies will have on the Israeli street, which may be heading towards turmoil as a result of the shock it has received today.
Also, the contradictory story issued by the army about finding the body of Al-Zayadna’s son, then retracting and saying that it had found evidence related to him, confirms to the Israeli street that the operation was not the result of an intelligence effort, as is said, in Bisharat’s opinion.
Not only that, the political analyst went on to say that this entire operation may have been arranged by the resistance, which may have tried to provoke the Israeli street at this particular time to confirm the fact that military pressure will not return the prisoners.
Bsharat concluded that all of Israel, including the street and the opposition, bears responsibility for the killing of these prisoners who fell victim to Netanyahu’s control over the political decision over the past period, indicating that both the army and the government are currently trying to hold the other responsible for the failure, which one party will ultimately bear.