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Other choice? Accept the deal and do a prisoner exchange in return for the hostages. No war, no ICC prosecutions, no IDF members committing suicide due to the depravity of their actions, Israelis would be able to travel/holiday without worrying about getting convicted for crimes against humanity/genocide, no Hezbollah rocket campaign destroying their economy, no Houthi rocket campaign making their ports go bankrupt...
Israel refused to take the hostages back multiple times because they preferred to go in and wipe out Gaza in order to try and ethnically cleanse and then settle the territory. Itamar Ben Gvir said multiple times that he had made sure to sink any deal involving the hostages being returned, and there's a decent chance that Smotrich resigns from government because getting the hostages back isn't worth not being able to murder more Palestinians and steal their territory.
Your beliefs seem to be:
That Israel should have taken no action after October 7 accept to comply with Hamas's demands for the return of the hostages.
That Israel wants to kill or remove all 2 million people from Gaza and settle the area themselves.
Would this be accurate?
My personal belief is that Israel should adopt a single-state solution with full democracy and franchise for everyone within the borders of Israel and Palestine. As for number 1... yes, I would prefer if they negotiated a return of the hostages. It might seem like a bit of a weak response if you hatched out of an egg on October 6th and have no prior knowledge of the region, but Israel has done far more and far worse to the Palestinians in the past. It would have been better to bury the hatchet and sue for peace on October 6th, but... well, 2 is accurate. I don't think there's any real arguments against this claim given that it is the official position of many members of the Israeli government. Not only do they want to do this, they have sunk multiple deals to return the hostages in order to keep the violence and ethnic cleansing going.
And the Palestinians would promptly elect a government that at least attempts to do far worse to the Israelis than the Israelis are doing or have done to Palestinians.
I don't believe that would be the case if there was a legitimate, good-faith effort to bring the two populations together and live in peace. It'd be a complicated process that required a lot of time and effort, as well as participation from the international community - you would of course have to have protections against retributive genocide. It wouldn't be easy or free of complications, but I think it'd be much better than the current apartheid situation.
This is incongruent with the population of Gaza being given political power. Even if Israel for the last 50 years had engaged in solely defensive actions, accepted mass bombings as a thing that happens, and never did any counterstrikes, the Arab Palestinians would still try to genocide them.
How exactly do you know this? Do you have access to some kind of magical or scientific device that lets you understand people so well that you can definitively state how they would act in an alternative reality that's extremely different to our own? I personally don't think that the jews are such awful people that living near them for fifty years with no problems or violence would make people want to exterminate them. That said, you've left a few things out - would there still be an apartheid state? Would there still be settlements on Palestinian land? What exactly do you mean by "solely defensive actions"?
In my opinion, the polity that is non-Jewish inhabitants of that territory includes a majority of people that cannot tolerate the existence of Jews (or Christians) in their vicinity. My evidence for this is that such populations in adjacent states populated by persons similar to Islamic Palestinians have also been ethnically cleansed or genocided over the last century.
In other words, we have centuries of evidence that polities consisting of Arab Muslims are evil, and Palestinians hew closely to the norms of said polities. In fact, they often embrace them to the extreme.
OTOH Israel's response to the provocations of its neighbors has been historically judicious, particularly given their military advantages. If they wanted, there would currently be zero Palestinians in Palestine. But not only that, zero Jordanians, zero Syrians, zero Lebanese. This is similar to the US in Iraq/Afghanistan. Our error was in being too concerned with casualties, when in war they often are the point.
Casualties, and humiliation. The failure of Afghanistan for the US was in trying a consultative approach, putting in local leaders who would exercise the necessary political authority to stabilize the violent tribes while staying their hand in conducting pogroms and massacres. The peace of the Taliban was an imposed one by the rifle, just as the peace of Timur was one of the sword and the peace of Shah (can't remember which one) was imposed by the Raj. Humiliation and subjugation destroys the root of a poisonous tree, and while the soil will grow another cursed plant later on, it will have to take a new form and promises at least a generation of brittle peace as it grows.
Israels peace with Jordan, Syria and Egypt would have failed were it not for their own internal coups. Israel may not have flown the star of david over Cairo, Damascus or Amman, but their internal rebels did, and that is itself enough to incentivize peace while buying time to deal with internal struggles. Israels light touch is not what rewarded it with peace, the incompetence of its enemies is what gives Israel each of its future days.
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