Israel has pushed deep into Gaza. It has mobilized large numbers of troops and is taking out top Hamas leaders and is on the verge of a full push into Gaza City that would finish Hamas.
And the Biden administration is pushing a demand straight from a demand by Hamas and its state sponsor, the Islamic terrorist state of Qatar.
President Joe Biden confirmed on Tuesday that he asked Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for a pause in the fighting in Gaza.
“I asked Prime Minister Netanyahu for a pause in the fighting in Gaza in a call on Monday,” Biden said, as quoted by Reuters.
Biden’s comments came hours after Barak Ravid of Axios reported that Biden urged Netanyahu in their call on Monday to agree to a three-day pause in the fighting to allow progress in releasing some of the hostages held by Hamas in Gaza.
According to a proposal that is being discussed between the US, Israel and Qatar, Hamas would release 10-15 hostages and use the three-day pause to verify the identities of all the hostages and deliver a list of names of the people it is holding, a US official told Ravid.
Remember when Hamas was claiming that it would release all the hostages in exchange for a 24-hour pause?
Hamas doesn’t need a three-day pause to verify the identities of the hostages. It’s had them for a month now.
Netanyahu has offered a pause in exchange for the release of all the hostages. Hamas won’t do that. And any list it produces is likely to be worthless. Islamic terrorists have a history of trying to claim ransom for dead bodies. It’s unknown how many of the hostages are actually alive. But if Hamas wants to verify all that, it can let the Red Cross (the actual one, not the Red Crescent which is just Hamas is a different color uniform) get access to them.
If there’s any lesson to be learned from Oct 7, it’s that Islamic terrorists lie. They attack under ceasefires, they make false promises and do anything they can to kill their victims.
The Israeli official told Axios that part of Netanyahu’s reservation is because Hamas attacked a group of Israeli soldiers, kidnapped one of them, and killed several others during a humanitarian pause during the 2014 Operation Protective Edge.
The Biden administration tried to rebrand the “humanitarian pause” as a “tactical pause”. Big mistake. This is a ground operation. Unlike air strikes, you’ve got soldiers in the middle of a battlefield. You can’t just hit the pause button. It’s one thing to have the WWI Christmas snowball fight, but we’re dealing here with monsters who cannot be trusted.
Why does Hamas keep demanding a pause and why do its supporters rally for a ceasefire?
Hamas has been hit hard, it needs to reposition, get some of its leaders out, move resources around and launch new attacks. Israel’s approach has been to keep hammering it, to move quickly, be agile and force it to react.
The Islamic terror group would like to stop reacting and take some kind of initiative.
That is what the ‘pause’ or the ‘ceasefire’ are for. It would be disastrous to agree to it.
The spectacular deal presented by Hamas and the Al-Thanis of Qatar is that it might release as many as 15 hostages in exchange for Israel allowing it to take the tactical initiative. Instead of Israel ending it and freeing the surviving hostages.
There’s nothing surprising about the actions of Hamas and Qatar here, but the Biden administration is playing into the hands of Islamic terrorists by pushing this offer.