Israel has given Hamas a proposal through Qatari and Egyptian mediators that includes up to two months of a pause in the fighting as part of a multi-phase deal that would include the release of all remaining hostages held in Gaza, two Israeli officials said.
Why it matters: While the proposal doesn’t include an agreement to end the war, it is the longest period of ceasefire that Israel has offered Hamas since the start of the war.
Driving the news: More than 130 hostages are still being held in Gaza. Israeli officials say several dozen hostages either died on October 7 or in the weeks since then.
Why is it so fucking hard for Isreal to offer an indefinite ceasefire.
My guess is because they don’t actually want a ceasefire, they want to keep fighting until they’ve taken more Palestinian land. But by making this non-viable offer they can pretend that they’re trying to end the fighting
Do you consider the Hamas offer this is a counter to viable in any way?
Yes?
Why on Earth would Israel agree to a complete retreat and guaranteeing Hamas continued rule and the safety of its leadership? That is a complete non-starter.
Why would Hamas agree to Israels bullshit terms? Palestinians are facing genocide at the hands of Israel, surrender is out of the question.
Israel needs at minimum complete international blacklisting, and more realistically needs to be dismantled as they’ve proven time and time again to be a terrorist state.
You live in fantasy land.
They should agree to the terms because Israel is getting backed by most of the governments of the western world and because Gaza is about to become the world’s biggest parking lot. They aren’t fighting a winning fight.
Are you kidding? This is the closest they’ve gotten to winning ever.
The whole world has turned against Israel due to their inhumane actions. They’re being taken to the ICC for genocide, the EU is basically done with their shit and moving forward with taking actions even when they’re not at the trials.
And if they stop, Israel will just continue in a few months or a year and wipe them out regardless.
This is just nonsensical. A dismantled Israel is an Israel that cannot protect its population anymore. We have seen on October 7 what happens if the IDF is absent for just a few hours. Not to mention, the entire idea is preposterous. Even if it made any sense, it’s impossible, because you can’t dismantle a nation armed with ICBMs and the strongest military in the Middle East. Are you even aware of the fact that just one third of its forces are active in Gaza? The rest are at Israel’s borders, in case someone else feels the need to martyr themselves.
You seem to believe that Hamas is some sort of protector of Palestinians, whereas in reality, they are the polar opposite. At best they are a magnet for Israeli retaliation. Their mere presence comes with guaranteed destruction, both from the large percentage of their own weapons that fail instead of reaching their randoms targets and Israeli strikes - and at this point, Hamas are so incompetent on their home turf that the biggest actual danger to IDF soldiers is friendly fire instead of these wannabe martyrs.
No it’s just idealistic because no matter what at the end of the day the US will back Israel and no one can stop them.
We have seen over 70 years what happens when Israel is present, October 7th was a horrific reaction to the horrors placed on Palestine by Israel.
I don’t believe that, I just believe they are empowered to fight as long as they’re being suppressed by Israel. If you want to end Hamas, you need to tackle the root issue; Israel or else are you’re doing is breeding more people who hate Israel for killing their family.
Did you know that the mastermind behind the October 7 massacres was imprisoned in Israel for the torture and murder of several Palestinians and Israelis? He was able to earn a degree at Tel Aviv University while in prison and when he complained about vision problems, Israeli doctors discovered a brain tumor. They removed it, saving his life. He was later released in a prisoner to hostage exchange.
One of the surgeon’s nephews is among the civilians Hamas abducted.
Yahya Sinwar was treated with kindness, despite being a monster who literally tortured people to death. He thanked Israel by leading the worst pogrom against Jews since the Holocaust. October 7 was not a reaction, it was not justified by anything Israel has or is said to have done, it was not an act of resistance. It was nothing more than an unjustified and unjustifiable act of cruelty, an expression of blind and incurable hatred.
You know what struck me the most about October 7, outside of the murders, rapes and abductions? It was the initial phase of the attack, when they systematically and expertly struck Israeli border defenses, when they disabled communications systems and overran command centers, when they used every little trick in the book to defeat a far superior opponent. Had it just been that, had they limited their attacks to purely military targets, it would have been an acceptable and legitimate act of armed resistance, one that would not justify the retaliation Gaza is experiencing right now.
They didn’t though.
All of this was just done so that they could murder and rape their way through peaceful little towns and villages, through a music festival. All of this expert planning and deception, all of the skilled execution was done solely so that they could hurt innocent people who share no blame for anything that the Israeli state has done to Palestinians. Hell, these terrorists were more than happy to torture and kill even fellow Muslims who spoke with the wrong accent or were just unlucky enough to be in their presence. That’s just terrorism.
Well, the world is not ready to talk about it, but Israel has been under bombardment by Hezbollah for months now.
I think both Hamas and Netenyahu’s government are both horrible awful blood-soaked evil. You don’t have to call one side good in order to call the other side bad.
Cause they need a target to point to as the bad guys. It makes taking the land easier to justify in the eyes of the international media.
Yeah, why not just offer it? It’s not like they have to actually abide by it once they got the hostages.
Because doing so would be a gross derelection of governance. Hamas has to go.
Because they want to eliminate Hamas - and I don’t blame them. You would have the same goals in their place. They cannot allow Hamas to continue their rule over the strip.
Not to mention, every past ceasefire was broken by Hamas, often mere minutes after it started. Hamas seeks these in order to make Israel look bad, because they know that their target audience will shift the blame for everything entirely onto Israel.
Well this is the biggest straight up lie out there. The previous ceasefire was broken by israel minutes after it started by killing a Palestinian civilian
Dated DEC 1:
That ceasefire ended on Sunday. Monday is not sunday. It is the day after Sunday.
Israel was the party that refused to extend the temporary ceasefire by refusing to continue hostage exchanges.
What I am talking about was israel shooting a Palestinian civilian in Gaza during the temporary ceasefire. They were the only party that violated it.
Doubtful.
Your “evidence” is the IDF playing a siren without any evidence of a rocket?
This is the IDF actually violating the ceasefire by the way. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/israeli-troops-fire-at-palestinians-attempting-to-return-to-northern-gaza-during-cease-fire
Hamas aren’t in Jerusalem so that’s just bullshit faithfully repeated by Israel’s media mouthpieces
Incorrect.
They funded Hamas and are largely responsible for their rule over the place instead of the PLO.
Make no mistake, Israel are the problem here first and foremost.
Qatar is the primary source of external funding for Hamas. Israel allowed these funds through after having been pressured to do so - and they justified caving in to themselves that having two weak groups fighting each other instead of one strong group would be more advantageous to them. This was obviously a grave miscalculation, but if you want to blame anyone for the funding of Hamas, it’s the country that owns Al Jazeera.
No I blame the country that stole the land promised to the Palestinians by the British from them and has ever since made their lives a living hell, while doing everything in its power to stop them from improving their situation because it’s more beneficial for them to have a hostile enemy to justify their push for lebensraum.
You do know that Arab Palestinians rejected the last offer the British made through the UN? This would have netted them far more land than they’ll have ever a chance of ever controlling now. They wanted it all, without any Jews in it, and launched, with the help of the Arab “allies” (who would soon sideline them, e.g. during the Egyptian occupation of Gaza), to eliminate Israel and - in their words - drive the Jews into the sea. They failed and that’s how they ended up expelled, powerless and stateless. Several more attempts followed, every time without success, until the Arab nations grew tired of losing against the IDF.
This violent rejection of the UN plan does not justify the Nakba (which was also used as an excuse to expel almost 1 million Jews from the Middle East and North Africa - two wrongs don’t make a right) and the eternal conflict that came with it, but it would not have happened without the war the Arab side started.
Some asshole that has nothing to do with you brutally murdered my extended family. The rest of my family lived in your house 10 generations ago. I’ve talked to authorities that have nothing to do with you or your town, and they agree that we should cut your house by half for my family to move into it. If you disagree, I’ll call you unreasonable and antagonistic to diplomacy, and will occupy half your house using firearms anyway. If you dare to fight back, I’ll shoot without mercy and take the kitchen too.
International politics can’t be broken down using simplistic analogies. That’s not how things work.
The ethics of the situation are the same: an ethnic group was victimized by the Nazis and some wealthy assholes decided an unrelated, colonized people would pay reparations with their own lands. The only ethical way for Jews to move into Palestine was by immigrating, coexisting with the locals and buying land, but coexisting with Muslims wasn’t in the plans of supremacists. They wanted a settler state and weren’t going to take a ‘no’ for an answer, and you’re deluded to claim Palestinians had any sort of freedom in that situation.
Why should they settle for half their land just because some genocidal fucks invaded?
Would you give up half your country to an invading force?
Because it’s not an invading force and the entire country is not Palestinians and it never was. The other side has always been there and for much longer. Dig anywhere and sooner or later, you’ll find something ancient with Hebrew writing on it - Hamas would know, because they make a killing from any ancient artifacts they come across when they are digging their tunnels. Modern Palestinians, while sharing a common ancestry with Jews, are the much later product of the often ignored Arab colonization of the Middle East.
Yes, there was a massive influx of Jews into Palestine, primarily directly after WW2, because they didn’t feel safe anywhere else after they realized that most of their neighbors were happy to either look the other way or betray them outright when the Nazis came for them. Do you really blame these people for wanting their own state where they could be the masters of their own fate and not be under the boots or at best a temporarily tolerated minority that has to think twice about showing their identity in public ever again? There are 49 Muslim-majority nations on this planet, there are 22 Arab majority countries, but only a single tiny one where Jews aren’t a minority. Why is this small spec of land such a big problem?
It is.
Just because there were Jewish people there in the past does not change that the people who came over before WW1 and started killing people in the region because they believed they had a god given right to land they’d never set foot on before in their lifetime are the ones the state of Israel was founded and is largely populated by.
There were literal Israelis who tried to form an alliance and work with Nazi Germany DURING WW2 because they hated the British for not giving them the country more than they hated the people actively killing them. Those same people went on to work in all areas of the Israeli government post WW2 and even held prominent positions such as prime minister while still saying Hitler did nothing wrong. It’s a fucked country to it’s core.
Do you also disagree with First Nations or Aboriginal peoples who fought against their colonisers? Should they have been happy with being rounded up and forced into scraps of their country?
It’s baffling that when you look into any of the backwards claims that “Israel funded Hamas,” they generally come down to the exact cooperation that activists demand of Israel.
On the one hand, people will demand that Israel allow equipment and infrastructure into Gaza, then accuse them of supplying the Hamas terror tunnels and rocket casings. People will chastise Israel for facilitating secret Qatari funds into Gaza from one side of their mouth while calling for open borders from the other side.