Gilead Sher is an Israeli lawyer and former senior negotiator in the peace process with the Palestinians. He said that Hamas is violating international law by not disclosing the identity, location or health condition of the hostages. “There's also a real fear that Hamas will treat [sic] the Israeli abductees with other Palestinian terrorist organizations. It has already announced that 30 of them have been handed to the Islamic Jihad,” said Sher, who is also a fellow in Middle East Peace and Security at Rice University’s Baker Institute.
“Over the years, [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu] led a failed and misleading security concept,” said Sher. “He preferred … the status quo over in-depth political solutions—even transitional or interim—in the West Bank and Gaza. His policy attempted to nearly topple the PA [Palestinian Authority] and strengthen Hamas while fostering Hamas’s sense of impunity and capability.”
Sher warned that, “if Israeli politics are not halted by democracies and the expansionist trends of the current government are not stopped by, first and foremost, America, then we are doomed to put an end altogether to the Zionist enterprise of having a Jewish democracy in parts of Eretz Israel.”
For example, Netanyahu‘s government has proposed wiping out the existing, apolitical state regulatory bodies and handing news supervision (as well as the ratings measurement) to the government — a de facto political takeover of the broadcasting channels side.