Egypt deliberately undermined the ceasefire agreement. Obviously Egypt is not a partner in peace and is focused on assisting Hamas in terrorizing Israel -- allowing arms, rockets, and munitions to be smuggled across the border. Israel has now take over the majority of the border in Gaza with Egypt putting an end to this duplicity and arming of Hamas. Egypt changed terms of Gaza ceasefire deal presented to Hamas, surprising negotiators, sources say https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/21/poli...changing-ceasefire-terms-for-hamas/index.html Egyptian intelligence quietly changed the terms of a ceasefire proposal that Israel had already signed off on earlier this month, ultimately scuttling a deal that could have released Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners, and set a pathway to temporarily end the fighting in Gaza, according to three people familiar with the discussions. The ceasefire agreement that Hamas ended up announcing on May 6 was not what the Qataris or the Americans believed had been submitted to Hamas for a potential final review, the sources said. The changes made by Egyptian intelligence, the details of which have not been previously reported, led to a wave of anger and recrimination among officials from the US, Qatar and Israel, and left ceasefire talks at an impasse. “We were all duped,” one of those sources told CNN. CIA Director Bill Burns, who has spearheaded the American efforts to broker a ceasefire agreement, was in the region when word reached him that the Egyptians had changed the terms of the deal. Burns was angry and embarrassed, the same person said, believing it made him look like he wasn’t in the loop or hadn’t informed the Israelis of the changes. The soft-spoken and mild-mannered Burns “almost blew a gasket,” said the source. A CIA spokesperson declined to comment. The three sources familiar with the matter told CNN that a senior Egyptian intelligence official named Ahmed Abdel Khalek was responsible for making the changes. Abdel Khalek is a senior deputy to the Egyptian intelligence chief Abbas Kamel, who has been Burns’ counterpart in leading Egypt’s mediation in the ceasefire talks. One source familiar with the negotiations said Abdel Khalek told the Israelis one thing and Hamas another. More of Hamas’ demands were inserted into the original framework that Israel had tacitly agreed to in order to secure Hamas’ approval, the source said. But the other mediators were not informed; nor, critically, were the Israelis. “Hamas was telling their people, ‘We will have a deal in place tomorrow,’” the first source said. “All sides were under the assumption the Egyptians provided the same document” that Israel had signed off on and the other mediators, the US and Qatar, were aware of, the person said. Instead, the second source said, the Egyptians sought to blur the lines between the original framework and Hamas’s response. In response to a request for comment from the Egyptian government, a senior Egyptian source told CNN, “Some parties play a game of accusing the mediators, blaming and accusing them of bias in order to evade making the required decisions. Egypt is surprised by the attempts of some parties to deliberately insult the Egyptian efforts to reach a ceasefire in Gaza.” A deal was close at hand A Hamas document obtained by CNN outlining the version of the framework they agreed to included achieving a permanent ceasefire and a “sustainable calm” to be reached in the second phase of the three-stage deal. Israel has been averse to agreeing to discuss an end to the war before Hamas has been defeated and the remaining hostages are released from captivity. Now, three weeks later, with ceasefire talks stalled, those involved are raising questions about the motives of Egypt, which for years has served as a key intermediary between Israel and Hamas, particularly Hamas members inside Gaza. Asked by CNN’s Jake Tapper on Tuesday if he was concerned about Egypt being involved with future ceasefire talks, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Israel was not prepared to agree to terms that would allow Hamas to attack Israel again. “I hope Egypt understands that we can’t agree to something like that.” The changes came more than a week after a team of Egyptian negotiators flew to Israel in late April to hammer out some of the final details of a framework to provide for the release of Israeli hostages in exchange for a pause in fighting and the return of Palestinian prisoners. Talks had been ongoing for months by then, since the last pause in the fighting fell apart in early December. With Israel agreeing for the most part to go farther than they previously had, there was a creeping sense of optimism taking hold that a deal was close at hand. Israel appeared willing to accept fewer hostages, release more Palestinian prisoners and allow Gazans in the southern part of the enclave to return home to the north unrestricted. US officials emphasized how “extraordinarily generous on the part of Israel” the framework was, in the words of US Secretary of State Antony Blinken. After discovering the Egyptian freelancing, Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani informed Israel’s intelligence service Mossad that Egypt had acted alone, two of the sources told CNN. Al Thani and CIA Director Burns got to work trying to salvage the proposal and re-balance it with elements they knew Israel would require. “It doesn’t make sense,” a senior Biden administration official said of why Egyptian intelligence would try to push something through without the essential input from the others. Changes made to appeal to Hamas After the Egyptians came back from Israel and conferred with Hamas, it became clear the group wouldn’t go along with what Israel was agreeing to, one of the sources said. So the Egyptian official made significant changes to get Hamas to agree. The day before Hamas made their May 6 public announcement agreeing to the proposal, an Egyptian source told CNN that Egypt had received Hamas’ response and relayed it to the Israeli side. “Several alternatives and scenarios were proposed to overcome the main point of contention related to ending the war,” said the source. The agreement’s language about ending the war has been perhaps the thorniest issue throughout the negotiations. But what Hamas sent back, Netanyahu said, “was very far from Israel’s core demands.” It wasn’t long before the discussions stalled. Negotiators, including Burns, returned to Cairo for one more round of indirect talks with Hamas. Israel agreed to send a team, as did Qatar, but neither sent senior officials, an indication that despite earlier optimism a deal would not be as imminent as hoped. Two days after Hamas’ response on May 6, Burns returned to Washington and sources told CNN the talks were “paused.” Mediators had hoped that a pause in the fighting would delay or even prevent a serious incursion into Rafah by Israel. Military operations by Israel in Rafah are now expanding despite protest by the Biden administration that they will threaten the hundreds of thousands of civilians who had fled there for safety. If talks resume, it’s expected that the Qataris would play a bigger role in the next round, the second source familiar with the negotiations said. A re-launch of the negotiations does not appear imminent but if it were to happen Egypt would still be expected to be central given their essential proximity to Hamas, as well as Israel’s preference of Egypt to Qatar. The discussions would still be expected to center on a broad framework that would include an initial stage in which up to 33 Israeli hostages would be released over at least 6 weeks. Hamas has been pushing to include the bodies of dead hostages in the initial release and also have the first phase flow into a second with no break. Both are positions Israel has resisted. US officials have argued that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar doesn’t actually want a deal since he may think he’s winning and the greater the Palestinian suffering the more the world turns on Israel. Critics of Netanyahu, including families of Israeli hostages, have accused him of being more concerned with removing Hamas from Gaza than getting his citizens home.
The Jews / Israel / the world should ask the question; Why does Israel forever have enemies? And the Jewish natural response will be (straight out of the Torah / Bible); "Because we love God and the world hates God". Think about it. Maybe there's a problem about a manufactured 'God'. It doesn't matter which religions, they're all manufactured by our imagination.
Gaza war: What does victory look like for the US and Israel? After more than seven months of war, analysts say Israel’s aims may be to destroy Gaza and displace its population. Palestinian women sit on the rubble of a residential building destroyed by an Israeli attack in Nuseirat in central Gaza on April 18 [Majdi Fathi/NurPhoto via Getty Images] By Ali Harb 22 May 2024 Washington, DC – Each day, the images emerging from Gaza remain largely the same: Israeli bombs killing civilians. Palestinians fleeing their homes and makeshift shelters. Hamas targetting Israeli forces and posting the footage online. After nearly 230 days of fighting, experts say Israel’s war in Gaza shows no sign of ending soon. So what is Israel trying to achieve? And do its objectives align with those of its closest ally, the United States? Israel has said it is seeking an “absolute victory” over Hamas, as it continues to receive billions of dollars in unconditional military aid from the US. But the country has faced criticism, including from allies, for its apparent lack of a long-term strategy in Gaza, beyond unleashing firepower on the Palestinian enclave. To some experts, though, the destruction and killings are part of the objective. They say Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is willing to wage an endless war to stay in power while deepening Palestinian suffering. And while the US government has said it seeks to end the conflict, Washington is fuelling the Israeli plans by maintaining its “ironclad” support for Israel, analysts say. “What Israel is looking to achieve is simply erasure and expulsion. That’s what they want here. And they’ve been blunt about this,” said Osamah Khalil, a history professor at Syracuse University. ‘A status quo’ Palestinian rights advocates fear that the war on Gaza is slowly becoming the status quo — another lengthy chapter of pain and dispossession in Palestine’s history. While Netanyahu has said Israel has “no intention of permanently occupying Gaza or displacing its civilian population”, high-level members of his government have suggested otherwise. Some far-right Israeli ministers have openly called for displacing Palestinians from Gaza. Other officials have urged the “voluntary migration” of the territory’s residents. And last year, the newspaper Israel Hayom reported that Netanyahu tapped one of his aides to work on a plan to “thin out” the population in Gaza. Egypt — the only country that borders Gaza other than Israel — has vehemently opposed the mass displacement of Palestinians, which experts point out would amount to ethnic cleansing. But Khalil said Israel’s plans for the mass displacement of Palestinians have not changed. If anything, the ongoing offensive in the southern Gaza city of Rafah has heightened the prospect, given that many residents sheltering there have already fled bloodshed and bombing in the north. And if the Israeli government fails to expel the Palestinians, Khalil believes it will instead try to contain most of Gaza’s population in small areas, preventing them from returning home and subjecting them to bombing, surveillance, starvation and disease. Adam Shapiro, a political analyst, offered a similar assessment. “Israel is really trying to make any semblance of life impossible in Gaza,” he told Al Jazeera. “The goal is basically to just make it impossible for people to continue living there and to compel them to leave.” Shapiro added that Israel has managed to level large parts of Gaza, starve its population and kill more than 35,000 people without facing considerable international pressure to end the war. “It’s a status quo that seems to be sustainable for lots of actors for a pretty long period of time,” he said. Matthew Duss, the executive vice president at the Center for International Policy, a US-based think tank, also said the conflict risks turning into a protracted one. He added that Israel’s lack of strategy in Gaza could have “catastrophic” consequences for Palestinians, the US and Israel itself. “You have a war of vengeance being carried out by a state that has the full backing of the global superpower who protects it from any consequences,” Duss told Al Jazeera. US vision for Gaza In the US, meanwhile, the administration of President Joe Biden has articulated a complex vision for the war and its outcome. Washington says it backs Israel’s push to eliminate Hamas’s military capabilities. It is also seeking a ceasefire deal that would see a temporary halt in the fighting, the release of Israeli captives and a surge in humanitarian aid to Gaza. At the same time, Biden officials have pursued an agreement to establish diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel, which they say would boost the prospects of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As for Gaza, the US says the territory should ultimately be under the governance of a “reformed” Palestinian Authority (PA). That US plan faces a mountain of hurdles, however. Netanyahu has repeatedly rejected the prospect of establishing a Palestinian state. Israeli leaders also oppose the return of the PA to Gaza. Even Israeli war cabinet minister Benny Gantz, who is seen as Netanyahu’s strongest domestic political rival, recently said that neither Hamas nor PA President Mahmoud Abbas can rule Gaza after the war. As for the so-called normalisation push to build ties between Saudi Arabia and Israel, Duss said it was “strategically misguided”. “The fact that they are still pressing this just reveals a confounding obsession with this kind of agreement as a way to bring something good out of this whole catastrophe,” Duss said. Defeating Hamas More immediately, it is unclear how Washington foresees a permanent end to the ongoing violence in Gaza while backing the goal of a total defeat of Hamas — an objective US officials are starting to acknowledge may be unachievable. “Sometimes, when we listen closely to Israeli leaders, they talk about mostly the idea of some sort of sweeping victory on the battlefield, total victory,” Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell told CNN last week. “I don’t think we believe that that is likely or possible.” With a military victory for Israel looking increasingly unrealistic, Duss said insisting on eradicating Hamas before ending the war is a “nonsensical position”. Israel said it dismantled Hamas’s “military infrastructure” in northern Gaza in January, but months later, its military is once again bombing neighbourhoods and clashing with Palestinian fighters in the Jabalia refugee camp and parts of Gaza City in the north. Khalil, the history professor, said that, since the beginning of the war in October, Israel has shifted its position on what needs to be done to eliminate Hamas in an effort to prolong and expand the war. For example, Israel first argued that Hamas’s headquarters was located at al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City — an allegation that proved to be false, despite being backed by US officials. Now, Khalil said Israel has changed its stance, asserting instead that “Hamas is actually located in Rafah. All their guys are in Rafah.” But, he added, Israel still has to justify restricting access to the north. “Why can’t we let Palestinians go back to northern Gaza? Because Hamas is still there. We have to do ‘mop-up operations’,” Khalil said, mimicking Israeli officials. He added that Israel is ultimately setting the stage for an open-ended war. The day after As the war rages, US and Israeli officials have been openly discussing what may come after the fighting ends. Netanyahu wants the Israeli military to exercise indefinite control over Gaza — a possibility his own Defence Minister Yoav Gallant rejected last week, calling instead for a Palestinian entity to replace Hamas’s governance. But what entity might fill that void? Experts doubt the PA’s ability to assert control over Gaza. In 2006, for instance, the PA lost a bruising legislative election to Hamas, and the following year, tensions erupted into violence between the two groups. Hamas routed the forces of Fatah — the faction that dominates the PA — in days and ultimately took control of Gaza. Questions also remain over what the US push for a “reformed” PA means. President Abbas — elected to a four-year term in 2005 — is now 88 years old. Notably, Washington has not called for an election to determine new leadership for the PA. “Bringing Fatah back or the PA back on the back of an Israeli tank will absolutely not work. That’s obvious,” Duss said. “You need some kind of local Gaza leadership that is willing to do this. And given the fact that we understand that Hamas will continue to have a presence in Gaza, it will require some measure of buy-in from Hamas.” But the US and Israel have ruled out involving Hamas in any discussions about Gaza’s future. Last week, Gantz suggested de-militarising Gaza and forming an international coalition with “American, European, Arab and Palestinian elements” to oversee its civil affairs. That plan has its own set of hurdles, including getting foreign countries to agree to participate in governing Gaza. Khalil said that even if Israel succeeds in going after all of Hamas’s battalions, the remaining Palestinian fighters will stay active. “This is a fantasy that you’re going to insert a NATO peacekeeping force,” he said. “And then what happens when the first roadside bomb goes off?” The bottom line, Shapiro said, is that Israel is focused on the destruction of Gaza, not its future, and the US is fully backing the war regardless of its stated plans. “I don’t know that anybody has a real idea about what governance in Gaza could look like in the aftermath of this.” Source: Al Jazeera
US hostility towards the ICC is nothing new – it has long supported the court only when it suits American interests Published: May 23, 2024 https://theconversation.com/us-host...-only-when-it-suits-american-interests-230663 Author Andrea Furger Graduate Researcher and Teaching Fellow in International Law, The University of Melbourne. I have previously worked for the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (2010 - 2015 and 2017 - 2021). This week, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) applied for arrest warrants for three Hamas leaders, as well as Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, in connection with the ongoing war in Gaza. The reaction of the United States, Israel’s main backer, was swift. President Joe Biden condemned the prosecutor’s action against Israel’s leaders as “outrageous” and accused the ICC of drawing false moral equivalence between Hamas and Israel. While it is not yet clear if the ICC’s judges will decide to issue the warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant, the Biden administration has already hinted at the possibility of imposing US sanctions against ICC officials. Yet, just a year ago, when the ICC issued arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and another Russian official for alleged international crimes in the Ukraine war, US officials were full of praise for the court. Biden welcomed the action, calling it “justified”. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, in fact, the US has continually displayed its support for the ICC. One top US official, the ambassador-at-large for global criminal justice, said the ICC “occupies an important place in the ecosystem of international justice”. The US’ apparent about-face when the court targeted its ally is nothing new. Nor is it surprising. Continues..... https://theconversation.com/us-host...-only-when-it-suits-american-interests-230663
At this point this is pretty obvious. Hamas is deliberately starving the residents of Gaza; stealing the aid and forcing it not to be distributed (unless residents pay for it). It’s ‘in Hamas’ Interest’ to Create ‘Situation of Misery and Starvation’ in Gaza https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/05...ery-starvation-columbia-university-professor/ A Columbia University professor says Hamas is responsible for the ongoing famine in Gaza. “It is in Hamas’ interest, as they have defined it, to actually create a situation of misery and starvation, rather than worrying about its population and making sure that its population stays safe,” according to Awi Federgruen, a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Business and a global supply chain expert. The United Nations says there is a “full-blown famine” in northern Gaza, which has led to additional pressure on Israel to allow more aid into the region, but Federgruen says the problem lies more in the aid not reaching the people it is intended to help. “A quick analysis shows that the amount of food that is coming in from Israel is absolutely plentiful to feed every single individual that lives in Gaza,” the professor says. In recent weeks, Federgruen says, food truck deliveries were slowed because “Hamas has chosen to send its rockets specifically to the crossings.” Federgruen joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to unpack what is known about the food shortage in Gaza, and Hamas’ role in blocking civilian aid. He also discusses the continued fallout from weeks of anti-Israel protests at Columbia University. (Article has podcast audio at above url)