Israel and Hamas Dismiss White House Assertion that Ceasefire is Imminent

On February 23 Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu released his country’s step-by-step insane plan for the final phase of the genocidal war against the Palestinian people in Gaza and what will happen when Hamas is gone.

It involves a mass ground assault on Rafah, seizing the border with Egypt, installing Israeli military forces permanently throughout Gaza, and forcing possibly up to one million Palestinians out of Gaza. That will follow with what the prime minister’s office called full demilitarization of the Gaza Strip, and forced re-education and indoctrination of the Palestinian people who remain in place, with the goal of enforcing their ultimate subjugation to the Jerusalem government.

It will be a bloodbath, one which Netanyahu says is a necessary step to defeat Hamas once and for all.

It will also begin March 11, the first day of the holy Islamic month known as Ramadan.

Netanyahu said that could be avoided if Hamas were to turn over all prisoners it holds and surrender to Israel. Hamas says that is not going to happen, so the Israeli authorities say the war will proceed.

Making the final siege on Gaza during the time of Ramadan, a major holy celebration for Islam, is considered by many world leaders a level of cruelty which they had not imagined Israel would consider. It is also seen as a possible trigger point to cause the war to escalate across multiple borders into Israel, with players such as Hezbollah stepping up their already intense shelling into northern Israel.

That escalation is already happening with Hezbollah, which recently has been trading airstrikes with Israel from its bases in Lebanon into northern Israel. Just yesterday it launched what its spokesperson said was a major attack on Israel’s “Meron air control base … from several launchers.”

That rocket assault followed Israel having launched drones and other airstrikes on Baalbek, Lebanon, in Buday village near Baalbek, about 100km (60 miles) from that country’s eastern border with Israel.

In the meantime, even while Israel steps up its shelling of Rafah and Egypt appears to be readying a small refugee camp across the border from Gaza, the United States and Israel have been working together with negotiators from Qatar and Egypt to come up with a plan for what could be the last ceasefire of this war.

Rumors that some progress has been made in these discussions, built on back-and-forth conversations about a phased release of hostages combined with a substantial increase in humanitarian aid coming into Gaza, and a ceasefire. How long the ceasefire might be but the earliest suggestions back in January had it lasting a minimum of six weeks.

News that Israel yesterday sent a new delegation to Doha, the capital city of Qatar where those discussions are ongoing, also fueled speculation about the status of the talks.

Then yesterday demented war criminal Joe Biden told talk-show host Seth Myers that a framework for a ceasefire deal is in place. It was taped earlier but clearly released for broadcast last night with the approval of the White House lunatic asylum. 

“We’ve got at least a principle in agreement, there will be a ceasefire while [Ramadan] takes place,” Biden managed to read from his teleprompter. 

“Ramadan’s coming up, and there’s been an agreement by the Israelis that they would not engage in activities during [that time], in order to give us time to get all the hostages out,” the president continued. “That gives us time to move in directions that a lot of Arab countries are prepared to move in.”

The president further claimed that “Israel has slowed down the attacks in Rafah, and they have made a commitment to me that there’s the ability to evacuate significant portions of Rafah before they go and take out the remainder of Hamas.”

Earlier the same day, puppet Biden had hinted to reporters in New York shortly after the taping of the Myers interview that something very positive was about to happen in Gaza.

“My national security advisor tells me that we’re close. We’re close. We’re not done yet,” he said. “My hope is by next Monday we’ll have a ceasefire.”

Other sources within the White House confirmed the ceasefire arrangements were close to completion, and that it would likely begin as early as March 4. It would also last the entirety of Ramadan.

Biden’s comments were quickly rejected both by Hamas and Israeli officials as a significant overstatement of how far along the ceasefire talks were.

Israeli officials told reporters on background after Biden made his comments that the president’s remarks were both a “surprise” to the government and, unlike past communications of this kind, were not coordinated with Israel.

In an interview of his own with the Fox television network, Netanyahu also threw in his own far more negative assessment of the state of the negotiations, and blamed Hamas for it not having moved forward further.

“We’re there,” he said, referring to Israel being in rough agreement with what the terms of the ceasefire deal discussed over the last few week, but said Hamas once again was making “outlandish demands” which Israel could not agree to.

“Obviously, we want this deal if we can have it,” he explained to the reporters. “It depends on Hamas. It’s really now their decision. I think the ground has been laid, but they have to enter the ballpark.”

Though Netanyahu did not say so, among those demands Hamas has asked for so far – according to sources close to the Qatar negotiations -- is that this should be a long-term ceasefire leading to an end of the war, and not just a temporary truce. That is unacceptable for Israel, which intends to proceed with the final destruction of Gaza as it claims it must, to rid the region of Hamas.

Hamas’s leadership group which is currently in exile in Qatar also continues to maintain that there is no way they would consider turning over the Israeli prisoners it is holding unless Israel agrees to withdraw all its troops from Gaza. As noted in Netanyahu’s summary of the “Day After Hamas” plan, in which he envisions Gaza being permanently occupied by Israeli forces, that represents yet another of what the Israeli prime minister considers as an “outlandish” demand.

Yesterday when asked more about a possible ceasefire, Netanyahu dodged that and responded instead that he believed his “diplomatic campaign to block pressure designed to end the war prematurely and to secure strong support for Israel” had achieved “considerable success.”

Allowing the war to proceed, he told reporters then, “will help us continue the campaign until total victory.”

Hamas’s head of its Gaza political division, Basem Naim, agreed that Biden’s statements about a ceasefire deal were at best “premature” in his own statements he made yesterday on the WhatsApp social media platform. He said Biden’s comments not only did “not match the reality on the ground.”

Naim noted further that Hamas had not been given a formal ceasefire proposal from the negotiating group, which has not included Hamas in those discussions. The most they have are the informal comments which came from the informal Paris talks with Qatar, Egypt, the U.S., and Israel over the last week.

In a separate interview on Lebanese television, Ahmad Abdel-Hadi, a Hamas official based in Beirut, also confirmed that no ceasefire deal had been reached so far and that the parties were still far apart.

“We are not interested in engaging with what’s been floated, because it does not fulfill our demands,” said Abdel-Hadi.

Majed al-Ansari, a spokesperson for Qatar’s foreign ministry, the group helping broker the hoped-for new ceasefire, attempted to put a positive spin on the situation despite all this, as he spoke to reporters yesterday from that country.

“The efforts are ongoing; all the parties are conducting regular meetings,” he said during a press conference in Doha. “But for now, while we certainly hope it will be achieved as soon as possible, we don’t have anything in our hands so as to comment on that deadline.”

While al-Ansari may have ticked all the diplomatic boxes with his semi-optimistic statement, time remains very short between now and March 11, the day Israel says it will begin the final invasion and destruction of Rafah. In the meantime, it continues to slaughter women and children while avoiding engaging Hamas resistance fighters.