Hamas has "accepted" the ceasefire agreement but "will negotiate the details". Remember that Hamas is simply playing a delaying game -- they have no intent for a path to peace, they simply want to stop the dismemberment of their terrorist group in Gaza by the IDF so they can retain power. Nor is it likely that the Netanyahu government will accept this ceasefire proposal -- a more moderate Israeli government might. The reality is that the IDF -- after moving into Rafah -- has Hamas on the ropes but it will take the rest of the year to finish the job. Hamas accepts UN ceasefire resolution, ready to negotiate over details, official https://www.arabnews.com/node/2528161/middle-east
Well Netanyahu has "accepted" the US plan as well. I don't imagine that either side in this negotiation is acting in good faith. Hamas is playing a delay game for time -- wanting the IDF to back off. Israel wants to finish the job of eliminating Hamas as a governing and militant entity in Gaza. As Hamas, Netanyahu 'accept' US plan, Sinwar 'riding high,' far from surrender Israel’s updated assessments point to the fact that Hamas is far from surrendering and that the group’s Gaza leader Yahya Sinwar and his surviving leadership partners are convinced time is on their side https://www.al-monitor.com/original...cept-us-plan-sinwar-riding-high-far-surrender
Yep, the Hamas leadership want to maximize the Palestinian civilian deaths as per the Wall Street Journal. Let's hear it in the terrorist leadership's own words. Messages Reveal Hamas Leader’s Ultimate Goal In War Against Israel — Let As Many Palestinians Die As Possible https://dailycaller.com/2024/06/11/...st-israel-let-many-palestinians-die-possible/ The top leader of Hamas wanted to use Palestinian civilian deaths in the ongoing Gaza war to create leverage against Israel, according to messages reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Yahya Sinwar, believed to be the architect of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack against Israel, has become a key player in the ongoing war in Gaza and the terrorist group’s refusal to accept a ceasefire deal. Messages sent by Sinwar throughout the war reveal that he believed Hamas should continue fighting as long as possible, as the civilians left dead in the war were “necessary sacrifices” in fostering criticism against Israel and creating international pressure on the Israeli government to end the war, the WSJ reported on Tuesday. (Much more at above url)
As expected, Hamas is just playing a delaying game. They immediately turned around and demanded conditions that have already been rejected by the international ceasefire brokers and Israel. Sorry Hamas, you can't trade dead hostages for prisoners. Additionally, Israel will not leave Gaza until all the hostages are released. There will be no permanent ceasefire timeline until Hamas releases the living hostages and turns over the bodies of the dead hostages. And no, it is not acceptable that Hamas remains in control of Gaza. Ceasefire talks in turmoil as Hamas responds to proposal https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/11/middleeast/hamas-responds-hostage-deal-intl-latam/index.html Talks to bring about a ceasefire and hostage deal that could stop the war in Gaza were thrown into doubt Tuesday evening when Israel characterized a Hamas response to the latest proposal as a rejection. Hamas had submitted its response to Qatari mediators, proposing amendments to the Israeli proposal, including a timeline for a permanent ceasefire and complete Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, a source with knowledge of the talks told CNN earlier on Tuesday. Talks are expected continue via the Qatari and Egyptian mediators in coordination with the United States to see if an agreement can be reached, the source added. But in a potential sign of how Israel views the proposed amendments, one Israeli official speaking to CNN analyst Barak Ravid described Hamas’ response to the original deal as a rejection. “Israel received Hamas’ response. Hamas rejected the proposal for a hostage deal, which was laid out by President Biden in his speech,” the source said according to Ravid’s post on X. This follows a United Nations Security Council vote on Monday approving a US-backed resolution calling for ceasefire and laying out a plan to end the war. The comprehensive three-stage peace deal, which sets out conditions intended to lead to the eventual release of all remaining hostages, in return for a permanent ceasefire and withdrawal of Israeli forces, was first laid out by US President Joe Biden on May 31. The Security Council resolution says Israel has accepted the plan, and US officials have repeatedly emphasized Israel had agreed to the proposal – despite other hawkish public comments from Netanyahu. An Israeli statement on Tuesday indicated it was poised to formally sign up to the current ceasefire plan for Gaza, while at the same time maintaining the freedom to keep fighting. ‘We are evaluating it right now’ Hamas has characterized its response to the ceasefire proposal positively, saying its delegates had “expressed its readiness to deal positively to reach an agreement.” “The response prioritizes the interest of our Palestinian people, the necessity of completely stopping the ongoing aggression against Gaza, and withdrawing from the entire Gaza Strip,” the group said in a statement. “The Palestinian delegation expressed its readiness to deal positively to reach an agreement to end this war against our people, based on a sense of national responsibility,” it added. The White House has so far declined to weigh in on Hamas’ response, with White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby telling reporters on Tuesday, “We were in receipt of this reply that Hamas delivered to Qatar and to Egypt, and we are evaluating it right now, and I think that’s really as far as I’m gonna go today,” Kirby acknowledged Tuesday that it’s “certainly helpful that we have a response…no question about that, I mean we’ve been eagerly awaiting a response,’ but emphasized, “We’ve only just gotten it, our team is going through it, and I understand the Qataris and the Egyptians are as well.” In a joint statement, Qatar and Egypt also confirmed they had received Hamas’ response, saying they expected “joint mediation efforts with the United States will continue until an agreement is reached.” This is a developing story and will be updated.
Blinken arrives in Qatar for talks with Gaza mediator JACK GUEZ Agence France-Presse June 12, 2024 — Doha (AFP) US Secretary of State Antony Blinken touched down in Doha on Wednesday for talks with key mediator Qatar after Hamas gave its response to a US-led proposal for a ceasefire in war-ravaged Gaza. Blinken, on a four-country swing around the Middle East to push Hamas to accept the truce plan, will meet the top leadership in the gas-rich Gulf state, which has transmitted messages to the Palestinian militant group. .......................... I can't but laugh at these clowns. Wanting peace and a cease fire (on their terms) while continuing to meddle and feed the inferno with weapons and ammo. "We want you to agree to peace as long as you follow our dictate. If you don't agree you're to blame". LMAO
As expected and outlined previously, Hamas is negotiating in bad faith and not accepting the deal. The ceasefire deal is effectively dead and the war will go on. Keep in mind that in the own words of the Hamas leadership, the terrorist group wants to maximize the number of Palestinian civilian deaths. Blinken Says Hamas’ Cease-Fire Demands Mean War Will Continue https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...s-cease-fire-response-means-war-will-continue
The terrorist crimes of the Hamas group are so evil it needs a new war crimes category. Hamas' Oct 7 massacre has legal scholars creating new war crime category ‘Kinocide’ is defined as the deliberate weaponization or destruction of families https://www.foxnews.com/world/hamas...egal-scholars-creating-new-war-crime-category
While we are at it... let's have people read the original Wall Street Journal source article (on MSN to avoid firewall). Those 37,000 Palestinian deaths in Gaza? Yeah, Hamas military leader Yahya Sinwar has resisted a ceasefire and hostage deal because those casualties are "necessary sacrifices" to make Israel look bad. Gaza Chief’s Brutal Calculation: Civilian Bloodshed Will Help Hamas https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/ar-BB1nYU8f For months, Yahya Sinwar has resisted pressure to cut a ceasefire-and-hostages deal with Israel. Behind his decision, messages the Hamas military leader in Gaza has sent to mediators show, is a calculation that more fighting—and more Palestinian civilian deaths—work to his advantage. “We have the Israelis right where we want them,” Sinwar said in a recent message to Hamas officials seeking to broker an agreement with Qatari and Egyptian officials. Fighting between Israeli forces and Hamas units in the Gaza Strip’s south has disrupted humanitarian-aid shipments, caused mounting civilian casualties and intensified international criticism of Israel’s efforts to eradicate the Islamist extremist group. For much of Sinwar’s political life, shaped by bloody conflict with an Israeli state that he says has no right to exist, he has stuck to a simple playbook. Backed into a corner, he looks to violence for a way out. The current fight in Gaza is no exception. In dozens of messages—reviewed by The Wall Street Journal—that Sinwar has transmitted to cease-fire negotiators, Hamas compatriots outside Gaza and others, he’s shown a cold disregard for human life and made clear he believes Israel has more to lose from the war than Hamas. The messages were shared by multiple people with differing views of Sinwar. More than 37,000 people have been killed in Gaza since the start of the war, most of them civilians, Palestinian officials say. The figure doesn’t specify how many were combatants. Health authorities said almost 300 Palestinians were killed Saturday in an Israeli raid that rescued four hostages kept in captivity in homes surrounded by civilians—driving home for some Palestinians their role as pawns for Hamas. In one message to Hamas leaders in Doha, Sinwar cited civilian losses in national-liberation conflicts in places such as Algeria, where hundreds of thousands of people died fighting for independence from France, saying, “these are necessary sacrifices.” In an April 11 letter to Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh after three of Haniyeh’s adult sons were killed by an Israeli airstrike, Sinwar wrote that their deaths and those of other Palestinians would “infuse life into the veins of this nation, prompting it to rise to its glory and honor.” Sinwar isn’t the first Palestinian leader to embrace bloodshed as a means to pressure Israel. But the scale of the collateral damage in this war—civilians killed and destruction wrought—is unprecedented between Israelis and Palestinians. Despite Israel’s ferocious effort to kill him, Sinwar has survived and micromanaged Hamas’s war effort, drafting letters, sending messages to cease-fire negotiators and deciding when the U.S.-designated terrorist group ramps up or dials back its attacks. His ultimate goal appears to be to win a permanent cease-fire that allows Hamas to declare a historic victory by outlasting Israel and claim leadership of the Palestinian national cause. President Biden is trying to force Israel and Hamas to halt the war. But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is opposed to permanently ending the fight before what he calls “total victory” over Hamas. Even without a lasting truce, Sinwar believes Netanyahu has few options other than occupying Gaza and getting bogged down fighting a Hamas-led insurgency for months or years. It is an outcome that Sinwar foreshadowed six years ago when he first became leader in the Gaza Strip. Hamas might lose a war with Israel, but it would cause an Israeli occupation of more than two million Palestinians. “For Netanyahu, a victory would be even worse than a defeat,” Sinwar told an Italian journalist writing in 2018 in an Israeli daily, Yedioth Ahronoth. Sinwar, now in his early 60s, was roughly 5 years old when the 1967 war brought him his first experience of significant violence between Israelis and Arabs. That brief fight reordered the Middle East. Israel took control of the Golan Heights from Syria and the West Bank from Jordan. It also captured the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, as well as the Gaza Strip, where Sinwar grew up in a United Nations-run refugee camp. The conflict was a constant presence. Sinwar published a novel in 2004 while in Israeli prison and wrote in the preface that it was based on his own experiences. In the book, a father digs a deep hole in the yard of the refugee camp during the 1967 war, covering it with wood and metal to make a shelter. A young son waits in the hole with his family, crying and hearing the sounds of explosions grow louder as the Israeli army approaches. The boy tries to climb out, only for his mother to yell: “It’s war out there! Don’t you know what war means?” Sinwar joined the movement that eventually became Hamas in the 1980s, becoming close to founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, and setting up an internal-security police that hunted and killed suspected informants, according to the transcript of his confession to Israeli interrogators in 1988. He received multiple life sentences for murder and spent 22 years in prison before being freed in a swap along with a thousand other Palestinians in 2011 for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. During the negotiations between Israel and Hamas over the Shalit swap, Sinwar was influential in pushing for the freedom of Palestinians who were jailed for murdering Israelis. He wanted to release even those who were involved in bombings that had killed large numbers of Israelis and was so maximalist in his demands that Israel put him in solitary confinement so he wouldn’t disrupt progress. When he became leader of Hamas in Gaza in 2017, violence was a constant in his repertoire. Hamas had wrested control of Gaza from the Palestinian Authority in a bloody conflict a decade earlier, and while Sinwar moved early in his tenure to reconcile Hamas with other Palestinian factions, he warned that he would “break the neck” of anyone who stood in the way. In 2018, Sinwar supported weekly protests at the fence between Gaza and Israeli territory. Fearful of a breach in the barrier, the Israeli military fired on Palestinians and agitators who came too close. It was all part of the plan. “We make the headlines only with blood,” Sinwar said in the interview at the time with an Italian journalist. “No blood, no news.” In 2021, reconciliation talks between Hamas and Palestinian factions appeared to be progressing toward legislative and presidential elections for the Palestinian Authority, the first in 15 years. But at the last moment, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas canceled polls. With the political track closed, Sinwar days later turned to bloodshed to change the status quo, firing rockets on Jerusalem amid tensions between Israelis and Palestinians in the city. The ensuing 11-day conflict killed 242 Palestinians and 12 people in Israel. Israeli airstrikes caused such damage that Israeli officials believed Sinwar would be deterred from again attacking Israelis. But the opposite happened: Israeli officials now believe Sinwar then began planning the Oct. 7 attacks. One aim was to end the paralysis in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and revive its global diplomatic importance, said Arab and Hamas officials familiar with Sinwar’s thinking. Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories had lasted more than half a century, and Netanyahu’s far-right coalition partners were talking about annexing land in the West Bank that Palestinians wanted for a future state. Saudi Arabia, once a champion of the Palestinian cause, was in talks to normalize relations with Israel. Though Sinwar planned and greenlighted the Oct. 7 attacks, early messages to cease-fire negotiators show he seemed surprised by the brutality of Hamas’s armed wing and other Palestinians, and how easily they committed civilian atrocities. “Things went out of control,” Sinwar said in one of his messages, referring to gangs taking civilian women and children as hostages. “People got caught up in this, and that should not have happened.” This became a talking point for Hamas to explain away the Oct. 7 civilian toll. Early in the war, Sinwar focused on using the hostages as a bargaining chip to delay an Israeli ground operation in Gaza. A day after Israeli soldiers entered the strip, Sinwar said Hamas was ready for an immediate deal to exchange its hostages for the release of all Palestinian prisoners held in Israel. But Sinwar had misread how Israel would react to Oct. 7. Netanyahu declared Israel was going to destroy Hamas and said the only way to force the group to release hostages was through military pressure. Sinwar appears to have also misinterpreted the support that Iran and Lebanese militia Hezbollah were willing to offer. When Hamas political chief Haniyeh and deputy Saleh al-Arouri traveled to Tehran in November for a meeting with Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, they were told that Tehran backed Hamas but wouldn’t be entering the conflict. “He was partly misled by them and partly misled himself,” said Ehud Yaari, an Israeli commentator who has known Sinwar since his days in prison. “He was extremely disappointed.” By November, Hamas’s political leadership privately began distancing themselves from Sinwar, saying he launched the Oct. 7 attacks without telling them, Arab officials who spoke to Hamas said. At the end of November, Israel and Hamas agreed to a cease-fire and the release of some hostages held by the militants. But the deal collapsed after a week. As Israel’s army quickly dismantled Hamas’s military structures, the group’s political leadership began meeting other Palestinian factions in early December to discuss reconciliation and a postwar plan. Sinwar wasn’t consulted. Sinwar in a message sent to the political leaders blasted the end-around as “shameful and outrageous.” “As long as fighters are still standing and we have not lost the war, such contacts should be immediately terminated,” he said. “We have the capabilities to continue fighting for months.” On Jan. 2, Arouri was killed in a suspected Israeli strike in Beirut, and Sinwar began to change the way he communicated, said Arab officials. He used aliases and relayed notes only through a handful of trusted aides and via codes, switching between audio, messages spoken to intermediaries and written messages, they said. Still, his communications indicate he began to feel things were turning Hamas’s way. By the end of that month, Israel’s military advance had slowed to a grueling battle in the city of Khan Younis, Sinwar’s hometown. Israel began to lose more troops. On Jan. 23, about two dozen Israeli troops were killed in central and southern Gaza, the invasion’s deadliest day for the military. Arab mediators hastened to speed up talks about a cease-fire, and on Feb. 19, Israel set a deadline of Ramadan—a month later—for Hamas to return the hostages or face a ground offensive in Rafah, what Israeli officials described as the militant group’s last stronghold. Sinwar in a message urged his comrades in Hamas’s political leadership outside Gaza not to make concessions and instead to push for a permanent end to the war. High civilian casualties would create worldwide pressure on Israel, Sinwar said. The group’s armed wing was ready for the onslaught, Sinwar’s messages said. “Israel’s journey in Rafah won’t be a walk in the park,” Sinwar told Hamas leaders in Doha in a message. At the end of February, an aid delivery in Gaza turned deadly as Israeli forces fired on Palestinian civilians crowding trucks, adding U.S. pressure on Israel to limit casualties. Disagreements among Israel’s wartime leaders erupted into public view, as Netanyahu failed to articulate a postwar governance plan for Gaza and his defense minister, Yoav Gallant, privately warned against reoccupying the strip. Israelis grew concerned the country was losing the war. In May, Israel again threatened to attack Rafah if cease-fire talks remained deadlocked, a move Hamas viewed as purely a negotiating tactic. Netanyahu said Israel needed to expand into Rafah to destroy Hamas’s military structure there and disrupt smuggling from Egypt. Sinwar’s response: Hamas fired on Kerem Shalom crossing May 5, killing four soldiers. Hamas officials outside Gaza began to echo Sinwar’s confident posture. Israel has since launched its Rafah operation. But as Sinwar predicted, it has come at a humanitarian and diplomatic cost. Sinwar’s messages, meanwhile, indicate he’s willing to die in the fighting. In a recent message to allies, the Hamas leader likened the war to a 7th-century battle in Karbala, Iraq, where the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad was controversially slain. “We have to move forward on the same path we started,” Sinwar wrote. “Or let it be a new Karbala.” (Article has pictures and additional information)
Of course, Hamas does not have any idea of how many hostages are still alive. It is obvious at this point that they murdered the large majority of them. Hamas official says ‘no one has any idea’ how many Israeli hostages are still alive https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/13/middleeast/hamas-interview-israel-gaza-hostages-intl/index.html