Journalist Ilana Dayan on Sentiments in Israel

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, INTERNATIONAL HOST: Ilana Dayan is one of Israel’s best-known journalists and she sees public opinion there shifting towards freeing the hostages as a priority, and she’s joining me now from Jerusalem. Ilana Dayan, welcome. You of all people have your finger on the pulse and I know that you’ve been traveling, you’ve been to the Gaza border communities that have been so desperately affected. Just let me start by asking you what you’ve seen and who you’ve been talking to most recently.

ILANA DAYAN, ANCHOR, “UVDA,” CHANNEL 12, ISRAEL: I got to tell you, Christiane, that for the first couple of days, I was looking for words. And then I drove there to the Gaza border, to one of the communities, you know, that was most affected by this horror — you know, horrific attack of Saturday, October 7th. And, you know, you stand in front of death, you stand in front of a paradise that was becoming just hell. I can tell you that I was in kibbutz Be’eri, a colleague of mine, a political correspondent working with me, the whole family, the whole family was executed at gunpoint, the parents and two young children. Another colleague, a news photographer, he was murdered, his wife was murdered, his two kids. He’s in the closet and the three-year-old is kidnapped in Gaza. Now, bear in mind that Israel is a country in which there are no degrees of separation. Everybody knows everybody. So, the government is speaking of, you know, an offensive, a ground attack in the next phase of the war and will beat Hamas and will destroy Hamas and will erase Hamas from the face of the earth, but when I’m talking about the shift in public opinion, the families are desperate, and Israel is a country in which you cannot leave these families without an answer. There is a report in the last few minutes that maybe the foreign nationals, those Israelis with another nationality, with foreign nationality will be released within the next few hours. And as you said, the Americans are very much involved now. And there might be the case that the Americans are stalling, are making Israel delay the next phase of the war so that negotiations can perhaps ripe into a deal at least concerning the civilians held by Hamas.

AMANPOUR: Ilana, let me ask you about that, because that is important news, if it’s actually true. Where are you hearing that from? I mean, do you feel that that’s a credible report?

DAYAN: It’s a report that is referred to an Israeli senior official who was quoted by foreign media. It’s an unconfirmed report.

AMANPOUR: OK.

DAYAN: But it comes together with more reports that are speaking about the fact that Hamas wants a deal. Hamas wants some kind of deal somehow to mitigate the terrible image, which was, you know, the result of this horrific attack on October 7th. They want a deal. They might want it less after the attack is launched. On the other hand, Israel has to do something that it didn’t do before. So, the government was speaking, you know, with high rhetoric, the kind of rhetoric that you and I know that leaders, when their ego suffers a blow, they speak about smashing, destroying, winning, getting a victory like we never had. And they spoke about winning first, hostages later. I think it’s changing now.

AMANPOUR: So, tell me that because that is super important because, as you’ve just been saying and we’ve been saying, there are, of course, reports and even the U.S. national security spokesman said today, you know, we obviously would like to have time to allow negotiations. He did not say, we’re urging Israel to delay, but he laid that out in so many words. So, the question to you is, I guess, first and foremost, is the government hearing, I guess, the people who seem to be coming out, the families of the hostages who are saying, no hostages first, our families first? Are they listening?

DAYAN: They are listening. They have to listen because of the ethos of Israeli society. Because we released over 1,000 terrorists for a single soldier in 2011, Gilad Shalit. Because Israel is a country in which the social ethos is based on solidarity, on national unity. You can see it these days, Christiane. You can see it these days. The fact that everybody goes now to volunteer somehow. The reservists are showing up in, you know, hundreds and thousands and hundreds of thousands. So, the government cannot ignore this kind of shift in public opinion. We interview the parents. We interview the relatives. There are families with the two grandparents, the kids, the grandkids in Gaza. You have 30 young kids in Gaza kidnapped. You have a three-year-old who is there alone, there’s a photo that I cannot forget of a mother from near Oz. I just saw the piece by Anderson Cooper holding her two young babies. One is three years old and one is ten months old. All of them in Gaza. I cannot even think, imagine, phantom what they are going through. And the Israeli government is listening to that too.