Cease Fire Negotiations between Israel and Hamas: Just Efforts; No Results?
Dr. Mohammad Ajmal
Hamas’s leaders and Israeli government officials in Qatar ended the Israeli ceasefire talks on 23rd August 2024 in which Hamas has rejected the “new conditions” in the cease-fire plan in Gaza presented by the United States. The next round of talks again took place in Cairo on 25th of August 2024. As it was perceived that, another round of negotiations between Hamas-Israel ceasefire will fail. According to reports, “there was no agreement on 25th of August in the Gaza ceasefire talks that took place in Cairo, with neither Hamas nor Israel agreeing to several compromises presented by mediators, two Egyptian security sources said, casting doubt on the chances of success in the latest US-backed effort to end the 10-month old war. Hamas says: “The United States has allowed Israel to commit massacres under the guise of negotiations”.
At the night of July 16, the Israeli army issued a new evacuation order to the Palestinians from southern Gaza. The area was previously declared a safe zone by the Israeli army. Now preparations have been made for bombing the same area. Israel will start bombing as soon as US peace and cease-fire negotiations begin. In these circumstances, the signs of the success of any kind of talks are not visible in the distant future.
In a message sent to Arab mediators last Monday before the talks, Hamas head YahyaSinwar said that if Israel is serious about the talks and wants Hamas to participate, it must first stop its military operations in the Gaza strip. YahyaSinwar, who has taken over the leadership of the movement since Ismail Haniyeh’s death, has said he believes the round of talks is merely a ploy to give Israel more time to launch its new military campaign in Gaza. YahyaSinwar strongly believed that Israel was only seeking time from the August 15 talks and was busy completing preparations for a new war. The Israeli military claims that because of its designation of southern Gaza as a safe zone, Hamas has started using the area for its base camp. Therefore, operation is mandatory here as well. According to the Israeli military statement, Hamas is using this area for attacks on Israel. The international news organization Reuters says that these claims have not yet been confirmed.
During the past 11 months, the United States, Britain and France have been talking about a cease-fire, but no practical steps are seen anywhere. US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken is visiting the region for the 11th time since October 7, 2023, and the massacre of Palestinians continues during this visit, according to the French news agency AFP, international pressure for a ceasefire in Gaza. After the escalation, US President Joe Biden said that we are closer than ever, but all this is a plan to massacre the Palestinians; and seems nothing else. The US State Department says US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken will visit Egypt, Qatar, Jordan and Israel later this week to make progress on the new proposal. The foreign minister will urge all parties in the region to refrain from escalating tensions or taking any other action, which would undermine the ability to finalize the agreement.
Since the killing of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in an attack in Iran on July 31, Washington, along with its European allies, has called for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. The killing was blamed on Israel, prompting threats of retaliation and fears of a major war in the Middle East. Qatar and US mediators are trying to finalize the details of the framework, which was initially outlined by Joe Biden in June and which he said was proposed by Israel. However, months of negotiations have so far failed to finalize the details of a ceasefire and prisoner release agreement.
The question is whether the mediators’ two-day talks in Doha were “serious and constructive” or whether everything is a plan to give Israel time? In a joint statement, they said the US had put forward a “conciliation proposal” to try to secure an agreement early in a new round of talks in Cairo next week. Hamas immediately announced its opposition to Israel’s “new terms” in the latest plan. Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, citing US President Biden’s framework, urged mediators to “press” Hamas to accept the June02 principles. According to AFP, Jordan blamed Netanyahu for obstructing the deal, and Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi urged “pressure from anyone who wants to see it through ought to be sincere. “Sources familiar with the crisis told AFP that conditions Hamas objected to include the presence of Israeli troops on Gaza’s border with Egypt and the release of Palestinians from Israeli prisons in exchange for Israeli hostages.
Diplomatic pressure on Israel to agree to a ceasefire has increased in recent weeks. Israel wants the hostages to be released first and then a ceasefire, but Hamas is not willing to do so.
British Foreign Secretary David Lammy and his French counterpart Stéphane Segerne held talks on Friday to push for a ceasefire in Gaza. Both of them are also visiting Israel, they are all working towards the same goal, which is to strengthen Israel’s defense and help Israel continue its massacre of Palestinians. This is why Israel’s foreign minister has told his counterparts that he expects foreign support to “attack” Iran if Iran attacks Israel to avenge Ismail Haniyeh’s murder.
A senior US official told reporters on condition of anonymity that Iran would face “catastrophic” consequences if it attacked Israel.
The EU’s top diplomat, Joseph Borrell, has said he will propose sanctions against the Israeli government. Borrell posted on X: “Israeli settlers fuel violence in the occupied West Bank with almost complete impunity. The Israeli government must immediately stop these unacceptable actions”. To be very frank, Mr. Joseph Borrel, who will tie the bell around this cat’s neck? Because America, France, Great Britain and the rulers of the Muslim world are all supporters of Israel. Rhetoric does not stop a war, a cease-fire requires force, and this force is only available to the United States, which it has given to Israel.
When Netanyahu says that the problem of Gaza will not be solved without uprooting Hamas, he means that all the elderly people in the three million Palestinians in Gaza are ex-Hamasists or Hamas sympathizers. All the doctors, patients, teachers, artisans and farmers are the backbone of the Hamas structure. As many women as there are, they have either given birth to Hamasist or they will continue to do so, and all the children that are being born will become a permanent threat to Israel in the next fourteen or fifteen years. Therefore, all of them must be eliminated because they are all Hamas, so either all of them migrate from the Gaza Strip or be killed.
The Israeli military machinery is being used to implement the same Netanyahu doctrine, and this doctrine has the open or tacit support of ninety percent of Israeli citizens. Therefore, any peace agreement that includes a condition that Israel stops killing all these “Hamasites” is unacceptable to the current Israeli establishment.
Therefore, all the resolutions that have been passed by the United Nations for the ceasefire, and all the legal opinions that have been given by the International Court of Justice., whatever the three-phase peace plan put forward in the name of the Biden formula, the relatives of the Israeli hostages have given as many sit-ins as possible in favor of a cease-fire, even the Israeli military high command has dismissed the desire to root out Hamas as impractical. Despite all this, Netanyahu’s vision of uprooting Hamas could not have come true. According to him, no peace plan is acceptable until the last Palestinian in Gaza is wiped out.
Eighty years earlier, Hitler had expressed more or less the same determination that everyone would become his slave or die, only then the peace that would be established would be acceptable to the Nazis. Nonetheless, the rest of the world did not accept these terms and peace was established only after Hitler’s death. Nevertheless, gone are the days, this is the new civilized and developed century, that was Nazi’s Germany, and it is today’s Hitler’s Israel.
Contrary to the Israeli interpretation of Hamas, for other researchers, Hamas is an armed political organization with a trained workforce estimated to be between 80,000 and 100,000 before October 7, 2023,its weapons were sourced from smuggled weapons and a rudimentary home-made weapons industry, key to his strategy is the network of underground tunnels in Gaza strip, it was supported by Qatar, Iran, Yemeni Houthis and Lebanese Hezbollah, however, Qatar has now positioned itself as an arbitrator.
In Gaza, Hezbollah formed a government in 2006 because of electoral success. Despite this, Israel, the United States and most of the Western countries were reluctant to deal directly with it, considering it a terrorist organization. However, it was symbolically part of the Palestinian Authority and now the PA has recognized Hamas as part of it again after many years as a result of Chinese mediation in last July.
The Israeli army claims that in the last ten months, it has eliminated seventy-five percent of the military strength of the al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, more than half of the underground tunnels have been wiped out and about 15,000 active armed guerrillas have been killed, the same number of raiders have been injured and 4,000 are languishing in the prisons of Israel.
However, the Israeli newspaper Jerusalem Post reports that as soon as the Israeli troops return from an area, Hamas begins recruitment of youth over the age of eighteen, these are the young people who have nothing left, in their form, and Israel has actually raised the crop of another vindictive generation. Israel’s dream of securing its borders by rooting out Hamas has been made even more insecure by the anger of at least one more generation of Palestinians.
Even today, ten months later, when Gaza has become a pile of rubble by all accounts, rockets continue to fall on Israel from the Gaza strip. In fact, these are not rockets, rather slaps which are falling on Israel’s face despite killing more than 40 thousand people and injuring around 100,000 and displacing two million people.
Hamas has disbanded its battalions and its fighters are now moving in groups of twos, fives and ten. Finding them in a crowd of refugees is like finding a needle in a haystack. Therefore, the solution has been found by IDF that where the presence of Hamas is suspected, the entire area should be destroyed; this strategy is also not succeeding.
In the last ten months, Israel has claimed to have killed thousands of Hamas fighters, but there has not been a single incident where any armed unit or small group of Hamas has surrendered to the Israeli army, rather fighting heroically and operating like a fly that’s it sand flies around your face and you turn your cheeks red trying to kill it. One thing has been proved in these ten months that Israel is not invincible despite its immense power.
Israel’s claims to destroy Hamas are at one place, but even the guardians of Israel are not ready to accept that Israel has so far destroyed only 30 to 35 percent of Hamas’ military forces and only 35 percent of its underground tunnels, as for the fighters, more are willing to be recruited than die. The mistake that Israel is making today, America made the same mistake 50 years ago in Vietnam and 25 years ago in Afghanistan. But Israel believes that it will succeed where no one else has succeeded. The bad news for Israel is that the graveyard of history is filled with states that died blind and deaf in the intoxication of their invincibility, and now they are popular among tourists as a sign of lesson.
Within the Israeli government, a long-running rift between Netanyahu and the military and security leaders over the viability of a ceasefire has become more public and violent, while in Israel, a resolution is still needed. Leaders in the Israeli forces have argued for weeks that their attacks on Hamas have largely destroyed the group’s ability as an organized force, and that while Hamas fighters will continue to pose threats to the insurgents, there is no compelling military reason to delay an agreement.
Members of the Israeli negotiating team have said privately that the prime minister has obstructed their ability to make meaningful offers during the last several rounds of talks, according to reports in Israeli media, Netanyahu has complained that negotiators, including his intelligence chief, are too willing to compromise, and recently told his political allies that they are “showing weakness,” according to Israel’s Channel 12.
On the other hand, Netanyahu is also under pressure from his key right-wing allies, some of whom have threatened to topple his government if he suspends the Gaza war too soon. While his negotiating positions are unpopular, however, Netanyahu’s overall political standing is actually improving. In recent months, his poll numbers — which had been dented by public anger over the October 7 attacks — have begun to rise.
On reaching to an agreement between the warring parties, Aaron David Miller, an expert in the affairs of the Middle East who many a time advised the Republican and Democrat administrations, has said: “Netanyahu plays with time – and plays with the United States.” after the United States included new Israeli demands in its latest proposal. Hamas said that this had become unacceptable in a statement accusing the US administration of being “bias”. In the light of this, “The Biden administration is stuck in a deadlock for negotiations that seems to have no way out.”
As senior officials met in Cairo on 25th August 2024 to try to bridge the gap, include CIA Director William Burns; David Barnea, the head of Israel’s Mossad spy agency; Egyptian intelligence chief Abbas Kamel; and Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani. While, the talks in Doha on Friday included American, Israeli and Egyptian officials, but progress has been modest, according to diplomats familiar with the crisis. Israel has proposed eight watchtowers along the Philadelphia Corridor, the United States has proposed two, and Egypt has “absolutely” rejected any, said a former Egyptian official familiar with the talks. Diplomats said Egypt is likely to stick to its position against an unlimited Israeli presence along the border. “Egypt will never agree” to any Israeli military presence along the Philadelphia Corridor, said a former Egyptian official familiar with the talks. “When Sisi decides something, he never changes it,” the official of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi said.
The negotiations held in Cairo on 25th August recuperated the same fate that of Doha on 23 August, Hamas said Israel has backtracked on a commitment to withdraw troops from the Corridor and put forward other new conditions, including the screening of displaced Palestinians as they return to the Gaza strip’s more heavily populated north when the ceasefire begins.
“We will not accept discussions about retractions from what we agreed to on July 2 or new conditions,” Hamas official Osama Hamdan told the group’s Al-Aqsa TV on Sunday.
In July, Hamas accepted a US proposal to begin talks on releasing Israeli hostages, including soldiers and civilians, 16 days after the first phase of an agreement aimed at ending the Gaza war, a senior Hamas source has told Reuters.
Thereafter, Hamas delegation left Cairo on Sunday after holding talks with mediators, senior official Izzat El-Reshiq said, adding that Hamas had reiterated its demand that any agreement must stipulate a permanent ceasefire and a full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.
(The author Dr. Mohammad Ajmal is an Assistant Professor at the Centre of Arabic and African Studies School of Language, Literature and Culture Studies, JNU, New Delhi)
