Right now, I want to bring in retired US Air Force Colonel Cedric Leighton for some serious analysis. Colonel, thanks so much for joining us. What do you expect Hamas to do during this brief pause in fighting?

Well, I think what they're going to do is they're going to move their forces around. They're going to try to avoid detection by the Israelis. That speaks to the cessation of drone flights. Hamas is going to take advantage of that because of the surveillance picture, that part of the surveillance picture, at least, will be lacking for the Israelis. Hamas is going to take advantage of that. They're also going to deploy their forces in a way that will allow them to potentially ambush Israeli forces. Now, they've got some serious challenges on the Hamas side because Israel is sending a lot of airstrikes their way and a lot of artillery strikes as well. And what that's doing is it's forcing Hamas back from the northern area of Gaza. So with all of that in mind, what you're seeing is a consolidation of forces on both sides with the preponderance of Israeli force right now concentrated in the north of Gaza and then potentially moving into the central part for a push once more into Gaza City. On the other hand, Hamas is going to try to keep as much of Gaza City as they possibly can, and they're certainly going to try to keep their tunnels active as well.

Colonel Israel's Defense Minister, Yov Galant, says he expects the fighting against Hamas to last, in his words, At least another two months. Do you see that as being enough time for Israel to accomplish its objective of completely destroying Hamas?

Not really, because destroying Hamas would require not only a military victory, but also a psychological and political victory. That is something that I don't see happening because at this particular point in time, you have two very hostile populations pitted against each other. Hamas is very determined to keep its power base in Gaza as long as it can. The Israelis, of course, are equally determined to uproot them. Hamas has basically got the upper hand when it comes to the hearts and minds, to use that overused term, of the Bosnian people. Though they had basically less than majority support before October seventh, right now I think their support has increased and that is going to also impact the way in which Israel has to conduct this war. So it's going to take more than two months if they want to complete that goal of destroying Hamas.

Retired Colonel Cedric Leighton, thanks so much for joining us.

You bet, Wolf.

And just a few hours from now, the first hostages being held by Hamas could be on their way home. So what will that transfer process actually look like? Obviously, it's going to be quite complicated, but where do these women and children who are expected to be the first ones out of the Gulf, out of Hamas's captivity, where do they go? Joining me now is the former FBI agent Robert D'Amico, who has worked on hostage cases overseas in his career is obviously the best perspective on this. Rob, let's just start with how much of a test do you think that the first day here is going to be for future swaps?

Oh, it's huge. I call this a moment of trust. You don't have to have trust on either side of it. But during the actual exchange, you have to trust each other quite a bit. It's complex. There's so many things that could go wrong, even without any ill effect on either side, if you have a faction not wanting to happen. We've tried to do hostage exchanges and even couldn't find them with the helicopter and trying to narrow it down before weather came in. But this one's going to take a lot of trust to move that many people through an area that's a part of war. Hamas isn't going to want them to be able to be tracked where they came from. I'm sure they'll come to a central point where they gather them and then move them to a point that they've agreed on. And same thing with the Israeli prisoners that are going to be coming out. But it is a tremendous task, and the first one is going to be extremely difficult. A lot of heightened tension on either side. It will go down a bit with each one, but even as small as error between them can have that spin out of control as far as losing trust.

How much does it hurt that it's not a direct line of communication between Israel and Hamas? I mean, this is all being mediated through the Qatari's.

So I've done a couple of these. One, actually, I ended up having... I was going through a senior Qatari that we were again moving some military folks to recover a prisoner held by the Taliban. It got so complicated that the Qatari had to flip his cell phone. I was talking straight to the Taliban commander because we couldn't find him. We had to lower the predator to look for him. Then they thought we're going to shoot them. They had machine guns. Thank goodness we had some communication to talk each other down. The second one, almost four years ago to today, November 2019, we exchanged Professor King and Weeks, two professors that were kidnapped from Kabul for the Haqqani 3. That one was a bit different and we had to give our side up the three first before they even released theirs. At one point, we actually had them there out going out to the airplane. We had to pull them back at the last second because something fell through. It didn't hurt. We did it the next day, but it was still a complex scenario. There's so many middle people involved to get word back and forth, but that was through the Qataris too.

Again, the trust factor, the Qatari is talking to Hamas, us talking to Qataris, since we've done it before with them, I think that helps a bit.

If you're a hostage and you are one of the first ones who is being released, what does that reintegration period look like? Obviously, they're going to need medical exams. They want to be reunited with their families. But these are people who have been deeply traumatized for 47 days now. What does that look like?

Yeah. So it's the reintegration, we call it VISA, bringing them back in, the first thing is medical. I'm sure with this many at this one time that they're going to have something set up where they come in and there's going to be a medical team for each person. I think the first are going to be 13 people. Don't know who, don't know ages and stuff, but there's going to be a medical team probably for each person. Along with that medical team is going to be hopefully a psychologist. The FBI has a psychologist under the victim's assistance folks that usually comes forward, at least to a middle ground. We'd usually move them to Germany where there's a whole team set up at the military base there in order to reintegrate them. Then the psychologist starts actually dictating what's allowed. We didn't even have agents or intel folks talking to them without the psychologist there because of all the stress that they're going through, we want to get information from them to help with other hostages and other things, but their physical and mental health is more important, and that psychologist that's assigned to them is the one really dictating.

I've seen some prisoners I debriefed. He was actually Pakistani, and he'd been held for five years by the Taliban. I debriefed him for about five hours before we sent him back, and he had me laughing. I couldn't believe how much sense of humor he remained after five years. He had a great outlook. He was making jokes and really coming around. That was incredible.

That is remarkable. I mean, your insight on this is so fascinating. Obviously, we're thinking of all of these who are going to be released. Robert D'Amico, thank you for joining us, and happy Thanksgiving.

Thank you. Happy Thanksgiving to you too.