GAZA/TEL AVIV, Nov 22 (Reuters) - Israel’s government and Hamas agreed on Wednesday to a four-day pause in fighting to allow the release of 50 hostages held in Gaza in exchange for 150 Palestinians imprisoned in Israel, and the entry of humanitarian aid into the besieged enclave.
This is such good news. Now the challenge is to keep both sides from reigniting.
I don’t really know what Hamas and Haniyeh and Sinwar want, so it’s hard to speculate what they’ll do, but I know that Netanyahu is trying to reignite the war as hard as he can, and will be desperate to see the ceasefire ended prematurely under circumstances he can blame on Hamas.
For those who haven’t followed his career (and his actions in the least week in particular) this seems abundantly clear. The absolute worst thing that could happen to him would be a deescalation that leads to an political negotiations. I really hope the US antiwar movement is prepared to increase their pressure, because I believe it’s made the difference in getting us this far. As furious as I’ve been at Biden’s response, I have read multiple reports that the US was far more involved in hostage negotiations than Israel, so I will give Biden this sliver of credit if people actually come home. But he really needs to stop propping up Bibi if he wants to land this plane for real.
Edit: 33 women are on the list of 300 total, I counted the Hebrew source material myself. 15+ is of those with stabbing charges and convictions or general attempted murder.
Overwhelming majority of minors did fucked up shit.
They picked this set because Hamas asked for this set. The actual convicted murders weren’t allowed to be released.
There’s no hostages in Israel, there’s people being processed by the courts. If you think the wait times are bad go check out Japan and claim they have hostages, or the US prison system with constitutional slave labor and barely any public defenders with the largest per capita prison pop in the world.
There’s something like 50 women total held.
All of these people get charged there’s a reason almost no one on the list is there for more than 2 years without being tried in civil court. The military tribunal cases convert over when they get processed. They were charged and their charges are listed in the database.
I think they might mean "want in an immediate sense". Even Hamas isn't deluded enough to think that they're capable of destroying Israel at this moment.
Yeah, but I mean, what is their goal now? Like, in the next few months kind of immediate, the kind of immediate that would cause them to accept a truce? Freshly minted fighters don't mean much if Israel gets away with ethnic cleansing, after all.
Goal now is to get Israel to withdraw and use hostages to extract concessions including the release of kidnapped Palestinians in Israeli jails and humanitarian aid for beleaguered civilians. The military hostages are probably the highest value from a negotiation standpoint and will be kept the longest.
Hamas believes that no part of the land of Palestine shall be compromised or conceded, irrespective of the causes, the circumstances and the pressures and no matter how long the occupation lasts. Hamas rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea.
Or perhaps this part:
Resisting the occupation with all means and methods is a legitimate right guaranteed by divine laws and by international norms and laws. At the heart of these lies armed resistance, which is regarded as the strategic choice for protecting the principles and the rights of the Palestinian people.
Oh wait, there’s more:
A real state of Palestine is a state that has been liberated. There is no alternative to a fully sovereign Palestinian State on the entire national Palestinian soil, with Jerusalem as its capital.
They define “Palestinian soil” earlier:
Palestine, which extends from the River Jordan in the east to the Mediterranean in the west and from Ras Al-Naqurah in the north to Umm Al-Rashrash in the south, is an integral territorial unit. It is the land and the home of the Palestinian people. The expulsion and banishment of the Palestinian people from their land and the establishment of the Zionist entity therein do not annul the right of the Palestinian people to their entire land and do not entrench any rights therein for the usurping Zionist entity.
They have only 1 segment that even hints that they might accept a 2 state solution:
However, without compromising its rejection of the Zionist entity and without relinquishing any Palestinian rights, Hamas considers the establishment of a fully sovereign and independent Palestinian state, with Jerusalem as its capital along the lines of the 4th of June 1967, with the return of the refugees and the displaced to their homes from which they were expelled, to be a formula of national consensus.
Which is pretty hard to take at face as an acceptance of a two state solution when it literally says in the sentence before that that they reject any alternative other than “from the river to the sea” and in the sentence after completely reject the Oslo accords.
First, that goal is like trying to drink the ocean. It’s obviously impossible, so it’s not useful as an indicator for what they’ll agree to.
Second, we hear this over and over, but the only citation is their founding document over thirty years ago. And in 2006 they went through a moderate rebrand, and then a lot of people in the org died, and Sinwar spent two decades in Israeli prison, so… that doesn’t really tell us where they’re at in this moment.
Folks act like they’re orcs. Just mindlessly evil. They’re definitely completely ruthless, but the stuff they do isn’t that different from what the IRA did, and they still made peace. So what does Sinwar want? Has anyone thought to ask?
Not necessarily. There were needed controls from Israeli side to ensure as little weapons get there as possible. That’s not blockade. That’s an attempt to prevent a terrorist organization to gain way too much power.
You know, instead of relitigating the crimes of both sides until we die, what if we just organize a new peace process already?
It’s been a fucking generation since anyone actually tried. And people always say, “Oh, ___ wont’ agree to that!” Well, okay, prove it. Book the big room at Olive Garden and see if someone shows up.
Obviously, it would be absolutely awesome to have a peace but firstly we need all the sides to agree on that. With Hamas present, neither Israelis/Palestinians will accept a deal.
Both sides make that claim, and neither is going to sit down as long as they have a choice not to.
Apartheid ended because the rest of the world left the people enforcing it with no means of retaining power. The same must be applied to Israel-Palestine.
Israel was blockading fucking food ports into Palestine. I’m sick of people trying to justify this extremist bullshit by painting every Palestinian as a terrorist. Yes it was a damn blockade. Stop fucking lying about it.
And the only reason Israel started the blockade was Hamas getting elected, which Israel helped them to do in the first place.
Not every palestinian is terrorist, I agree. So now let’s divide people into 2 categories: West bank inhabitants and Gaza inhabitants.
Hamas in Gaza made the population so radical that both egypt and israel decided to close the borders. They (at least Egypt) would not do it if the population was not so radical.
In the West Bank, people are less radical but still it’s not ideal.
They also assassinated their journalist Shireen Abu Akleh last year so idk what type of ceasefire it is when only one side gets to murder the others (but they didn’t drop any bombs so it’s ok).
The blockade was in response to the election of a known terrorist organization that was amassing weapons.
But hey, if you think it’s okay to try and murder Israeli civilians on the daily, why are you so mad at Israel killing Palestinian civilians? Seems pretty hypocritical of you.
The thing is: Occupation is also an act of war, and Gaza (and the West Bank) have been occupied by Israel since 1970. You see the current state of the West Bank? This was also Gaza before 2005.
As a result of the 1967 war of aggression by the PLO. Palestine lost a war and still had a government that mandated the destruction of Israel as their second charter. So they weren’t exactly a friendly neighbor to Israel.
You mean the election that the Israeli government helped Hamas win, then used as an excuse to punish Palestinians? You fucking pro-Israelis are the biggest liars on the planet.
What’s your point? I don’t see how this relates to either my statement that it is good news that hostages are being released or my statement that it will be a challenge to keep both sides from reigniting.
Dang, finally, 50 is still small amount but hopefully this lead to more. More importantly is the flow of humanitarian aid
Israeli media said the first release of hostages was expected on Thursday. Implementing the deal must wait for 24 hours to give Israeli citizens the chance to ask the Supreme Court to block the release of Palestinian prisoners, reports said.
Presumably there are “alternates” if there are objections to a specific person being released. One of the conditions is that no one who was convicted of murder will be released, so it may include someone who only gravely injured someone, rather than actually killed someone.
If you can find the list you can search each name. There well likely be some news articles about each one.
Nobody said Israel wants to kill all Gazans. However, by their own admission, they want to forcibly relocate them (which is ethnic cleansing and depending on who you ask genocide) for Lebensraum.
Just as the Gazans want to forcibly relocate the Israelis, most of whom were born there, and a large percentage have families that have been there for hundreds of years.
Both sides want to ethnically cleanse the other, yet idiots on this site seem to love to support Palestine only, and ignore their own attempts at genocide.
“Therefore, we declare that any targeting of our defenceless civilians’ homes without prior warnings will be met with the execution of an Israeli civilian hostage in our custody, and this event will be broadcast publicly“
Original comment: Maybe I’m just confused, but doesn’t Hamas themselves use the same terminology?
Hard to say with translations, a lot is up to the translator.
*In response to your edit, I thought you were referring to what does Hamas call their people being held by Israel. What Hamas calls their hostages seems less relevant to me.
The concept of evaluating media for bias and conflating that with factuality is, frankly, terrifying. A site’s political views is not necessarily representative of its factuality, but Media Bias Fact Check consistently penalizes sites that have “never failed a fact check” because they are not considered to be “least biased.”
These sites bite off more than they can chew. They’re extremely US-Western-centric (mostly because the authors of these sites tend to be American and thus have their own set of American biases) - claiming that America is somehow the paragon of journalistic freedoms and free speech is, in itself, an American bias. CBC, which hasn’t failed a fact check, is only a “high” on the factual reporting scale, for example. Meanwhile Reuters, for which I can point to multiple instances where they got key details wrong, gets a “very high” for factual reporting.
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