Two things have been constant throughout Netanyahu’s long stint in power. He is notoriously indecisive, especially when it comes to military and security matters, and he is obsessed with his political survival. Those characteristics coloured his approach to hostage diplomacy, and to the broader war in Gaza. He is presiding over perhaps the most fateful moment in Israel’s history in half a century, an unprecedented situation that calls for clear, decisive thinking. And he is doing so at a time when he is historically unpopular (and under criminal indictment, to boot).

The agreement between Israel and Hamas began on Friday morning with a truce that will last for four days. Each afternoon, Hamas will release around a dozen hostages; for each one, Israel will release three Palestinians from its jails. After the initial four-day agreement, Hamas has the option to release additional captives. Each 10 that it frees will secure another 24 hours of quiet. It could prolong the lull by days or even weeks if it was so inclined.

It took weeks of negotiations to reach this point. At first Hamas leaders pushed an “all-for-all” deal: all of the hostages in exchange for all of the Palestinians in Israeli jails (they numbered about 5,200 before the war). On October 20 it did release two hostages, a mother and daughter with dual American-Israeli citizenship. That was a result of American pressure on Qatar, the tiny Gulf state that hosts some of the Hamas leadership. Three days later, it released a pair of elderly Israeli women — ostensibly as a humanitarian gesture, more likely as a public-relations move and a way to put pressure on the Israeli government.

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Then Israel began its ground offensive in Gaza, and the negotiations changed. Instead of “all-for-all”, Hamas wanted to trade hostages for a truce. Israel was open to the idea, but only if the number was substantial: at least 100 captives. Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas in Gaza, wanted a lower number and refused to budge. That led to disagreements within the Israeli government.

The centrist members of Netanyahu’s war cabinet — Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot, both former army chiefs — wanted to continue negotiating a smaller deal. So did David Barnea, the Mossad director, who represented Israel at the talks in Qatar. On the other side were Yoav Gallant, the defence minister, and the heads of the army and the Shin Bet security service. They wanted to keep fighting and argued that progress in the military campaign would help their position at the negotiating table.

Netanyahu, as is his wont, decided not to decide. A similar deal was on the table last week, but the prime minister decided not to bring it to a vote in the cabinet, only to reverse himself days later. What changed in the intervening time was pressure — some of it from America, but mostly from the families of the hostages in Israel.

From the start, those families have complained of inattention from Netanyahu’s government. The places that were attacked on October 7, and from which many of the hostages were taken, are not home to many Netanyahu voters. While the kibbutzim are not quite the socialist bastions of yore, they still lean Left. In Nahal Oz, a village on the Gaza border, Netanyahu’s Likud party received just 10% of the vote in last year’s election, compared to 23% nationwide. In nearby Be’eri it won less than 3%.

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It took the prime minister more than a week to meet with them. When Joe Biden visited Israel last month, some Israelis marvelled at the scene: an elderly American president flew halfway around the world and showed more compassion for the families of Israeli hostages than their own prime minister had.

He stood in stark contrast with the coordinator Netanyahu appointed to oversee the hostage issue, Gal Hirsch — an army general who was forced to resign in 2006 because of his failures during the war in Lebanon. His main qualification for the job is that he is a Netanyahu crony and Likud activist. At a meeting with foreign diplomats last month, he berated them for supporting the Oslo Accords and suggested they were complicit in Hamas’s atrocities. “It’s time to wake up,” he yelled while pounding on the podium — a curious way for an Israeli official to build international support.

And so the families were left to fend for themselves, joining together to lobby Israeli officials and foreign leaders. They enlisted David Meidan, a former Mossad officer who negotiated a hostage deal with Hamas in 2011, to serve as an informal consultant. And they organised a protest march from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem to put pressure on the government.

They won over hearts and minds, but not the political establishment. Some Right-wing lawmakers are furious about the deal: they do not want Israel to make concessions, certainly not a truce (which could give Hamas militants time to regroup) or the release of Palestinian prisoners. It took weeks of intense pressure from the families to convince Netanyahu to prioritise their needs.

Such politicking has been a constant throughout the war. In the days after October 7, Netanyahu’s political and media allies put out a stream of messages that sought to place the blame on the army and security services. The prime minister was not to blame for the calamity, the generals were — a remarkable message to brief during wartime.

Then he dithered about whether to approve a ground offensive. The army called up 360,000 reservists, which brought parts of the economy to a standstill, and deployed them near to the border with Gaza. There they waited, for days and days. Officers grumbled that they could not keep soldiers at high readiness for much longer. Another jarring message came from Netanyahu’s camp: the army wanted to throw ground troops into the meat grinder of urban warfare before the air force had time to soften up northern Gaza. The intended message was that Netanyahu cared about the lives of soldiers; the generals did not.

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The Israeli public, however, is not buying it. An October poll by the Israel Democracy Institute (IDI), a non-partisan think-tank, asked Israelis who they trust more to run the war: Netanyahu or the army chiefs. 55% of Israeli Jews chose the army, while just 7% said the prime minister (the rest were split between “both” or “neither”). Even among Right-wing Jews, the army had a 31-point advantage.

This unpopularity has bred insecurity, and the fear of losing his base still overshadows every decision Netanyahu makes. Members of his coalition have variously talked about rebuilding the Israeli settlements in Gaza, which were evacuated in 2005; expelling Gaza’s population to tent cities on Egypt’s Sinai peninsula; and dropping a nuclear bomb on the enclave. A sensible prime minister would shut down such talk, which angers Israel’s allies and feeds a global narrative that it is committing a genocide in Gaza. But Netanyahu has not: better to risk Israel’s standing in the world than his standing with Israel’s Right wing.

A more recent IDI poll found that 63% of Israelis (including 52% of Right-wing Jews) think the Government has no plan for what comes after the war. They are probably right. America and some Arab states would like to see the Palestinian Authority (PA) return to power in Gaza after the war. This idea is probably far-fetched. The PA is already losing control over parts of the occupied West Bank; it is too weak and unpopular to effectively govern Gaza. But it is the only alternative, however unlikely, to a prolonged Israeli occupation of the enclave.

Netanyahu, though, has ruled it out in multiple public statements. Right-wing voters do not like the PA — one nationalist group put up a billboard in Tel Aviv showing Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, wearing a Hamas headband — and that is enough to scotch the idea.

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For all his pandering to his base, though, it is hard to see how Netanyahu survives the next election. His prospects were shaky even before October 7, after a year of political turmoil caused by his controversial effort to hobble the supreme court. Now they look dismal. A survey published by Ma’ariv on Friday found that Likud would win just 18 seats, down from 32 in last year’s election. Gantz’s centre-right party, on the other hand, would swell from 12 seats to 43.

The final result may look different. Some of the Israelis who now support Gantz may end up voting for other candidates, such as Naftali Bennett, the former prime minister now mulling a return to politics. No one can predict the future mood of the electorate, though everyone thinks it will be in their favour. Last month, a prominent centrist lawmaker told me the war would swing Israelis to the centre, while a far-Right member of Netanyahu’s coalition said it would strengthen the Right.

Still, the trend is clear: survey after survey shows Netanyahu’s personal support has collapsed, with even Right-wing voters saying they will abandon his coalition and vote for change. For now,  Israelis will spend the weekend fixated on a rare bit of good news. But when the truce ends, scores of hostages will still be in captivity, a brutal war will grind back to life, and the country’s political divisions will be just as stark as before.

It is hard to make sense of the day’s events — because they are unprecedented. What should have been a quiet holiday-weekend Shabbat began with Hamas firing more than 2,200 rockets at Israel. The massive barrage seems to have been cover for an even bigger operation: infiltrating dozens of militants into Israel. Some went to Sderot, the biggest city near Gaza; others fanned out to the small kibbutzim that run the length of the border.

By evening the death toll stood at 150, with at least 1,100 Israelis wounded. Both numbers will almost certainly rise, and the Israeli army says it is still fighting in 22 locations. Hamas also claims to have abducted 35 Israelis and brought them to Gaza. While the exact number is unconfirmed, footage shared on social media suggests they do indeed have captives, both civilians and soldiers.

The most obvious question is what went wrong: this is Israel’s biggest intelligence failure in half a century, since the surprise Arab invasion on Yom Kippur in 1973. Its security services have a network of informants in Gaza. Every call from a mobile phone in the territory is routed through an Israeli network.

Hamas must have needed many months to plan such a complex operation — and Israel knew the group wanted to conduct one like this. During its 2014 war with Israel, Hamas smuggled commandos through a tunnel and landed a group of frogmen on an Israeli beach. The Israeli army has warned for years that the group would try more such infiltrations. Yet when it finally happened, the army seems to have been caught entirely unaware.

Nor was this just an intelligence failure. Israel has kept Gaza under a tight blockade for a decade and a half. Heavy restrictions on the flow of goods and people have crushed its economy: two-thirds of Gazans live below the poverty line, and three in five are unemployed. But the blockade has not unseated Hamas — nor, apparently, stopped it from planning sophisticated attacks.

The Israeli government has spent billions of shekels to build a barrier on its border with Gaza, a mix of concrete slabs and metal fencing studded with high-tech sensors. Yet the militants simply cut through it and zipped across on motorbikes, or flew over it in paragliders.

Once they crossed over, they enjoyed freedom of action for hours. All morning long, residents of border towns called Israeli journalists to ask where the army was. In recent months it has mostly been deployed on other fronts: the occupied West Bank, where tensions are at a boil, and the north, where it is worried about Hezbollah. The south seemed quiet — until it wasn’t.

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A full accounting will probably have to wait until the inevitable commission of inquiry finishes its work. For now, the focus will be on a response. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has said Israel is “at war”; the defence ministry has approved a wide call-up of army reservists; the air force has already begun air strikes on Gaza, which will continue for days.

During the 2014 war, which dragged on for 50 days, some of Netanyahu’s Right-wing coalition partners pushed for a full ground invasion of Gaza. Avigdor Lieberman, the foreign minister at the time, wanted Israel to reoccupy the territory (Israel withdrew its troops and settlers from Gaza in 2005). But the army feared that a ground offensive would lead to weeks of bloody urban combat. Netanyahu listened to the generals and ignored the politicians.

Such demands, however, will be harder to ignore this time. The cause for war is much bigger. And Netanyahu’s coalition is different: where in 2014 it was a broad mix of parties, from the centre-left to the Right, today it runs only from the Right to the far-Right.

The presence of Israeli hostages in Gaza — probably distributed across a number of far-flung hiding places — may make some officials reluctant to green-light a ground offensive, in case they are executed. But they are also worth more to Hamas alive than dead. The group would prefer to exchange them for prisoners held by Israel, as it did in 2011 with Gilad Shalit, a soldier swapped for 1,027 Palestinians.

So, how will Israel respond? This has been a turbulent year for the country, largely due to Netanyahu’s efforts to overhaul its judiciary. Yet after Hamas’s latest attack, political divisions have been temporarily set aside. Activists have suspended their weekly demonstrations against the government. They also urged reservists — some of whom vowed to boycott their mandatory service in protest over Netanyahu’s reforms — to report for duty if called. Israelis have a saying in times like this: “There is no coalition and no opposition.”

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When the fighting ends, though, the recriminations will start. The opposition will have a compelling argument: it will say that Netanyahu has been preoccupied, and that he has surrounded himself with a coterie of inexperienced ministers, such as Itamar Ben-Gvir, the hard-Right ideologue appointed to run the police. And they will have a point. Netanyahu’s pitch to voters has always rested on his handling of Israeli security. Yet “Mr Security” has a habit of falling out with his security chiefs. Ehud Barak, who served him as defence minister, later described his old boss as “reckless”; Meir Dagan, a storied Mossad director, called him “destructive”. True to form, he will try to pin blame for this weekend’s catastrophe on the army and security services.

While the intelligence failure resembled 1973, in other ways the closest analogue for the day’s events was Israel’s war of independence in 1948. During the 1973 war, after all, Egypt and Syria only advanced as far as the occupied Sinai Peninsula and Golan Heights. This time, Palestinian militants stormed Israel proper, raiding towns that are within its internationally recognised borders.

The resulting images — of gunmen on the streets and dead bodies piled at bus stops —will not soon be forgotten. The second intifada, the campaign of Palestinian suicide bombings that killed more than 1,000 Israelis between 2000 and 2005, was a death knell for the peace talks that followed the Oslo Accords in 1993. A generation of Israelis gave up on the prospect of a settlement with the Palestinians. Today’s attack, perhaps the worst in Israel’s history, will similarly harden public opinion.

But Israel will have to weigh the consequences of its response. Hezbollah, the Shia militant group-cum-political party in Lebanon, said it was “conducting a continuous assessment of events”, a verbose way of saying it plans to sit on the side-lines — at least for now. Mired in a four-year economic crisis, Lebanon is in no position to endure a war. But a harsh Israeli counterattack on Gaza may draw it in anyway, lest its leaders be seen as ignoring the Palestinian cause.

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Hamas will also use the attack to boost its popularity in the West Bank, where the Palestinian Authority, the nominal self-governing body, is widely loathed. Mahmoud Abbas, the president, is 87; Hamas no doubt has an eye on an eventual succession struggle.

Further afield, until this morning, diplomatic parlour talk in the Middle East was obsessed with the possibility that Saudi Arabia might normalize ties with Israel. The Biden administration has spent the year pushing for a three-way deal: America would offer a defence pact to the kingdom, which would offer full recognition to Israel.

What Israel might give was always unclear. The Americans and Saudis hoped to extract some concessions that would make the occupation marginally less painful for Palestinians. That idea was never realistic, given Netanyahu’s hard-Right coalition; now it is impossible. Nor will the Saudis be eager to recognise Israel against the backdrop of a war in Gaza.

After 15 years of almost-uninterrupted Netanyahu rule, many people inside Israel and out have internalised his view of the conflict: that the status quo is indefinitely sustainable. Today’s events should shake that view. Hamas is more capable and less quiescent than Israel thought; in the West Bank, meanwhile, the PA is rapidly losing control. Yet an Israel united in grief and anger will be in no mood for talks or concessions. The status quo has never looked so fragile — and what comes next will be bloody.