Recently, Hamas was offered a six-week ceasefire that would take them fully through the holy month of Ramadan, along with a very generous ratio in a prisoner-for-hostages exchange and large increases in aid deliveries during the pause in the fighting.
Senior Hamas official Osama Hamdan has already released a statement saying they will not accept the terms.
This from hotair.com.
According to Egyptian officials, which has been involved in the ongoing negotiations:
Hamas has already been offered a ceasefire. Several of them, actually. They have consistently turned them down and will do so again this week.
Further:
Less than a week before the start of the [moslem] holy month of Ramadan, the informal deadline for a deal, three days of negotiations with Hamas over a cease-fire in Gaza and the release of Israeli hostages failed to achieve a breakthrough Tuesday.
The nearly five months of fighting left much of Gaza in ruins and created a worsening humanitarian catastrophe, with many, especially in the devastated northern region, scrambling for food to survive.
Aid groups have said:
[Delivering] supplies within most of Gaza has become nearly impossible because of the difficulty of coordinating with the Israeli military, the ongoing hostilities, and the breakdown of public order.
What should have been obvious from the beginning is that “Hamas is not engaged in any serious negotiations and they have no intention of striking a reasonable deal.”
Hamdan made his priorities clear in his most recent statement.
He’s not looking for a compromise. He wants Israel to surrender. He is demanding a permanent ceasefire and the full withdrawal of all IDF forces and Israeli personnel from Gaza.
And even then he isn’t saying that he will release all of the hostages or even a list of names of the surviving captives.
News for Osama Hamdan:
– This is a war and it’s a war that Hamas started,– You don’t surrender in a war when you are winning,– Bibi Netanyahu has been clear about that from the first day of the counteroffensive,– Hamas can either surrender en masse or be destroyed, and– [I]f that means that Gaza has to be smashed until there are no two stones left standing one atop the other, so be it.
The world knows and all but the most insane radicals fully realize:
If Israel were to evacuate at this point, Hamas would simply start recruiting and rebuilding and they would go back to launching terror attacks against Israel with the full backing of Iran.
Obviously, Hamas would not even bother with these sham negotiations if they did not offer the chance to buy some time. The terror group is counting on international pressure on Israel and the United States to eventually force Bibi to relent and pull back. Sadly, much of the international press and pro-Hamas activists in America and at the UN are playing into that strategy—right on cue. But at least for the time being, Netanyahu is standing strong and refusing to back down.
Osama Hamdan has not given Israel any reason to believe he will negotiate in good faith. He has not agreed to release a list of the names of the surviving hostages. He will not release the bodies of the dead. He apparently sees the remaining hostages and the bodies as trading material at this point.
Final thoughts: Hamas must be crushed, and whatever rises from its ashes must also be crushed. And no one from the western world should stand in Israel’s way of doing what needs to be done.
