A former director of Israel’s Mossad spy agency has admitted that the regime’s pressure on the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas has failed to yield any significant results over the past year and a prisoner swap deal should be signed as soon as possible.

Danny Yatom, who led the occupying entity’s spy organization from 1996 to 1998, was quoted as saying by the Hebrew-language Maariv daily newspaper on Thursday that Israel needs to abandon military pressure on Hamas to facilitate a long-awaited deal for the release of Israeli captives in the besieged Gaza Strip.

“We have seen in the last year and two months that the pressure on Hamas has hardly helped. There were two operations in which we managed to rescue abductees through military action, but this is almost the only thing that can be done. We should have come to the conclusion a long time ago that the use of force endangers the abductees,” Yatom said.

“The only way to bring back the abductees alive is through political action and I urge the decision makers to advance a deal, even at the cost of ending the war,” he added. “We need to go to a deal, and yes – get out of Gaza. It will always be possible to return to Gaza.”

Hamas held captive around 250 people during its unprecedented operation against the occupied territories on October 7, 2023. The resistance released 105 of the captives during a week-long truce last November. 

Six captives were killed in an Israeli airstrike on the southern Gaza Strip in September.

Hamas said at the time that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu “is directly responsible for the killing of dozens of captives due to bringing the ceasefire efforts to a failure.”

The Gaza-based resistance movement has repeatedly said that there is no alternative other than “a ceasefire, the withdrawal of the occupation forces, and the implementation of a prisoner exchange agreement” in return for the release of the Israeli captives.

Netanyahu has long been obstructing mediation for a truce and a deal to release the captives still held by Palestinian groups in Gaza.

After nearly 15 months of the Gaza onslaught, the Tel Aviv regime has failed to achieve its declared objectives of eliminating Hamas and freeing captives, despite killing more than 45,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and injuring upwards of 107,000 others.