Anarchists and Theoreticians: The Blinken-Sinwar Paradox and the Origins of Hamas’s Fate
It would not be a solution in the near term, as the violence continues, because Mr. Blinken was not sure how such an arrangement would be implemented. But restoring the Palestinian Authority — which administers parts of the West Bank — to power in Gaza would not be easy even if Israel managed to end Hamas’s rule. Its leader is unpopular. Many Palestinians view him as corrupt and say his attempts to win independence through peace talks have failed.
Hamas, meanwhile, effectively sought to undo history, starting with 1948, when more than 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes in what would become Israel during the war surrounding the foundation of the Jewish state.
The political situation in Palestine deteriorated in the summer of 2007 when Hamas took control of Gaza. Suddenly, it was not just fighting Israel, but also governing Gaza. Israel, in tandem with Egypt, imposed a blockade on the strip aimed at weakening Hamas, plunging Gazans into deepening isolation and poverty.
In 2012, Mr. Sinwar became the armed wing’s representative to Hamas’s political leadership, linking him more tightly to the leaders of the military wing, including Mr. Deif, the mysterious head of the Qassam Brigades. The two men are believed to be the key architects of the attack.
‘I don’t want war anymore, but I want it to end’: Israel’s response to the Israeli-Israeli conflict and the need for the Palestinian Authority
He said that he is not saying he won’t fight anymore. “I am saying that I don’t want war anymore. I want the siege to end. You walk to the beach at sunset and you see all these teenagers on the shore chatting and wondering what the world looks like across the sea. He said what life looks like. “I want them free.”
While not recognizing Israel’s right to exist, Hamas did issue a political program in 2017: it allowed for the possibility of a two state solution.
Israel agreed to allow $30 million a month in aid from Qatar into Gaza and increase the number of permits for Gazans to work in Israel to bring in much needed cash into the economy.
“The Israelis were only concerned with one thing: How do I get rid of the Palestinian cause?” Mr. Hamdan said something. They were going in the wrong direction and not paying attention to the Palestinians. And if the Palestinians did not resist, all of that could have taken place.”
People with knowledge of the assessments said that the National Security Council and Israeli military intelligence thought that Hamas did not want another war.
Many in Israel’s security establishment also came to believe that its complex border defenses to shoot down rockets and prevent infiltrations from Gaza were enough to keep Hamas contained.
By the end of the month, American and other western analysts estimated that Hamas had 20,000 to 40,000 people with about 15,000 rockets and most of them being smuggled in through Egypt. They said that the group had portable air-defense systems and mortars.
Mr. Sinwar had also restored the group’s ties to its longtime backer, Iran, which had frayed in 2012, when Hamas shuttered its office in Syria, a close Iranian ally, amid Syria’s civil war.
Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said Wednesday that Gaza should be unified with the West Bank under the Palestinian Authority once the war is over, offering a strong signal about what the United States sees as its preferred endgame in the fight between Israel and Hamas.
Mr. Biden has come in for pressure from Democrats who are deeply split on the conflict. On Wednesday, the majority of the Senate Democratic caucus signed a letter asking Mr. Biden to ensure that Israel has a viable plan for defeating Hamas and will use U.S. military assistance in keeping with international law.
The remarks by Mr. Blinken on Wednesday reflect a deep anxiety on the part of Mr. Biden and his aides inside the White House as the conflict enters its second month. What started in the days after Oct. 7 as an unambiguous rush to the defense of an ally has become a much more complicated diplomatic challenge for the president to help define an alternative to open-ended war in the Middle East.
“We don’t have it all figured out right now,” John F. Kirby, a spokesman for the National Security Council, said Wednesday on CNN. I have no idea if we could, at this point, in the conflict. We know that it needs to be something different from what it was under Hamas.
But as the humanitarian crisis in Gaza deepens, Mr. Biden has tried to balance his support for Israel with calls for the protection of Palestinian noncombatants and for “humanitarian pauses” in the fighting.
In his comments on Wednesday, Mr. Blinken made no reference to the presence of Israeli forces remaining inside Gaza, home to about 2 million Palestinians.
Early on the morning of Oct. 29, as the Israeli Army was just moving into Gaza, Netanyahu tweeted and then deleted a social media post in which he blamed Israel’s defense and intelligence establishment for failing to anticipate Hamas’s surprise attack. The Israeli military and intelligence leaders had warned Netanyahu that his pointless coup against the country’s judiciary was fracturing the army and Israel’s enemies were starting to notice its vulnerability.
How does a democracy live with such a threat? This is exactly the question these demonic forces wanted to instill in the mind of every Israeli. They aren’t seeking a territorial compromise with the Jewish state. Their goal is to collapse the confidence of Israelis that their defense and intelligence services can protect them from surprise attacks across their borders — so Israelis will, first, move away from the border regions and then they will move out of the country altogether.
Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad wreaked havoc in southern Israel on October 7th, killing women, children, babies and the elderly. More than 1,000 people were killed and more than 200 taken hostages and ferried to Gaza. On Wednesday, Israeli investigators said that “victims were tortured, physically abused, raped, burned alive and dismembered.”
Biden cannot help Israel build a coalition of U.S., European and moderate Arab partners to defeat Hamas if Netanyahu’s message to the world remains, in effect: “Help us defeat Hamas in Gaza, while we work to expand settlements, annex the West Bank and build a Jewish supremacist state there.”
The Gazans of Kiryat Shmona, a refugee camp in the Hezbollah-Sharing-Israel War
Kiryat Shmona is located on the border with Lebanon. That father said his family had fled the northern fence line with thousands of other Israeli families after the pro-Iranian Hezbollah militia and Palestinian militias in southern Lebanon began lobbing rockets and artillery and making incursions in solidarity with Hamas.
When might they go back? They had no idea. Like more than 200,000 other Israelis, they have taken refuge with friends or in hotels all across this small country of nine million people. It was only a few weeks that Israelis started to drive up real estate prices in central Israeli towns. Without invading like Hamas, that alone is mission accomplished for Hezbollah. Along with Hamas, they are also Shrinking Israel.
I asked Liat Admati, 35, a survivor of the Hamas attack who ran a clinic for facial cosmetics for 11 years in Be’eri, what would make it possible for her go back to her Gaza border home, where she was raised.
“The main thing for me to go back is to feel safe,” she said. “Before this situation I felt I have trust in the army. I feel that trust is in deep trouble. I don’t want to feel that we are covering ourselves in walls and shelters all the time, while behind this fence there are people who can one day do this again. I really don’t know at this point what the solution is.”
Before Oct. 7, she and her neighbors thought the threat was rockets, she said, so they built safe rooms — but now that Hamas gunmen came over and burned parents and kids in their safe rooms, who knows what is safe? “The safe room was designed to keep you safe from rockets — not from another human who would come and kill you for who you are,” she said. She concluded that the most dispiriting aspect of the situation was that some Gazans who worked on the kibbutz gave Hamas maps of the layout.
A lot of Israelis listen to a recording of the man who killed a woman and called his parents from the phone.
I killed many of them with my own hands. Your son killed Jews,” he says, according to an English translation. He says that your son is a hero. His parents can be heard rejoicing in the background.
This kind of chilling exuberance — Israel was built so that such a thing could never happen — explains the homemade sign I saw on a sidewalk while driving through the French Hill Jewish neighborhood of Jerusalem the other day: “It’s either us or them.’’
This conflict is back to it’s primordial roots. This seems to be a time of eyes for eyes and teeth for teeth. The morning-after policy thinking will have to wait for the mourning after.
Really? Israel has 9.499 million people who live there, including Jews in the West Bank settlements, according to the Central Bureau of Statistics. 1.99 million (19 percent) of those are Arab, and 472,000 (5 percent) are neither. The population of the West Bank is around three million, and the population of the Gaza area is around two million.
Netanyahu is saying that seven million Jews will rule over five million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza for the rest of their lives and that there will be no political horizon or statehood one day.
After being slammed by the public for digitally stabbing his army and intelligence chiefs in the back in the middle of a war, Netanyahu published a new tweet. “I was wrong,” he wrote, adding that “the things I said following the press conference should not have been said, and I apologize for that. I fully support the heads of [Israel’s] security services.”
But the damage was done. How much trust do you think the military leaders will place in Netanyahu once the campaign for Gaza is over? What leader would that be at the beginning of a war of survival?
The leader of this society is better than this society. It is too bad it took a war to drive that home. The founder of Brothers in Arms is a retired member of Israel’s most elite special forces unit. Brothers in Arms organized aid workers and reservists to get to the front right away, even if that meant it was left, right, religious and secular.
It’s a remarkable story of grass-roots mobilization that showed how much solidarity is still buried in this place and could be unlocked by a different prime minister, one who was a uniter, not a divider. Or as Scherf put it to me: “When you go to the front, you are overwhelmed by the power of what we lost.”
The Action of Hamas on Friday for a Day During the Lull in Fighting: Israel’s Response to the Gazans
During the lull in fighting this week, people in northern Gaza used Salah al-Din Road to flee to southern Gaza.
The agreement formalizes and expands on what Israel has been doing in recent days as its forces have allowed people to evacuate northern Gaza for several hours at a time along a single corridor south. There would be a second corridor for evacuates opened along a coastal road and the daily pauses would include advance notice of at least three hours.
The announcement of daily pauses in two corridors came after days of efforts to persuade Israel to do more to reduce civilian casualties. Mr. Biden asked Mr. Netanyahu during a call on Monday to pause its assault on Hamas. The secretary of state pressed his case during his visit to the region, as did the defense secretary and national security adviser.
The daily pauses would allow for more civilians to leave the fighting and possibly facilitate the release of some of the 200 hostages held by Hamas, including a few Americans, as well as provide a better chance for the delivery of more humanitarian supplies, Mr. Kirby said. He noted that 106 trucks of humanitarian aid crossed into Gaza on Wednesday, toward a U.S. goal of 150 trucks a day.
In Israel, the office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement that 50,000 Gazans had taken safe passage to the south of Gaza on Wednesday alone. “The fighting continues and there will be no cease-fire without the release of our hostages,” the statement said, adding, “We once again call on the civilian population of Gaza to evacuate to the south.”
A few days was how long Mr. Biden asked for a pause. The president was asked if he was frustrated that Mr. Netanyahu was taking so long to agree. He said that it took a little longer than he thought. He said they are still optimistic about the hostages.
“Frankly, a cease-fire at this time would in all practicality legitimize what they did on Oct. 7, and we simply aren’t going to stand for that at this time,” Mr. Kirby said.
U.S. officials are concerned about the Israeli response to the Gaza attack against Hamas in the recent Gaza Strip quagmire
The Israeli military has limited time to carry out its operations in Gaza before anger among Arabs in the region and frustration in the United States and other countries over the spiraling civilian death toll constrain Israel’s goal of eradicating Hamas, U.S. officials said this week.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said on Wednesday that he was worried about Hamas, if civilians were killed in Gaza.
His comment offered a rare glimpse of divisions between Israel and the Biden administration, which has declared its support for Israel’s military campaign even as the civilian death toll has increased. It came as the United Nations secretary general, António Guterres, said that the number of civilians killed in the Gaza Strip showed that there was something “clearly wrong” with Israel’s military operations against Hamas.
But the longer the Israeli military campaign continues, the greater the chance that the conflict will spark a wider war, several officials in the Biden administration said. The international sympathy for the Palestinian cause has increased because of Israel’s response to the Hamas attacks, said several officials.