Israel rejects yet another ceasefire deal after Hamas's acceptance, as US ships more weapons

Any deal involving the US as a guarantor is worth less than a sheet of toilet paper.

The familiar script has been at play again: Hamas accepts a US-mediated ceasefire deal, Israel rejects it, the US blames Hamas for rejecting the deal it never rejected, the cycle repeats.

This same pattern has been repeating ever since the first signs of a ceasefire appeared likely back in May last year, when Hamas accepted a deal that the then-Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, described as “extraordinarily, extraordinarily generous on the part of Israel.” After Hamas’s acceptance, the Israelis intensified the bombing of Rafah. A full year and thousands more dead Palestinians later, nothing has changed.

On Monday, multiple outlets reported that Hamas had agreed to a ceasefire proposal put forward by US special envoy Steve Witkoff and the Palestinian-American intermediary Bishara Bahbah. All that the deal required was Israeli approval.

However, the Israelis had other plans — the same ones that they have had for every previous ceasefire proposal: they killed it.

The deal would have seen a 70-day ceasefire during which Hamas would have released five living Israeli prisoners of war at the start and five more at the end of the ceasefire period in exchange for aid into Gaza and freedom for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners, who are being tortured and deprived of basic necessities in Israeli dungeons.

Also read: Inside Israeli dungeons: Torture, murder, and the spirit of resistance

“The proposal includes the release of 10 living Israeli hostages held by Hamas in two groups in return for a 70-day ceasefire and a partial withdrawal from the Gaza Strip,” Reuters reported, quoting a source. Jeremy Scahill, quoting a “senior Hamas official,” reported the same arrangement.

Scahill reports that, as part of the deal, “Trump would publicly thank all parties, including Hamas, reaffirming his commitment to the ceasefire and a lasting resolution between Israel and Palestine.”

This sounds eerily similar to another deal that the Americans trashed after Hamas did all that it was supposed to do. The Palestinian resistance released their prized capture Edan Alexander on May 12 in a deal brokered by Bahbah and Witkoff. As part of the arrangement to secure Alexander’s release, Witkoff had promised Hamas that Trump would call for an immediate ceasefire and allow aid into Gaza.

“If we release [Alexander], Trump will speak out thanking Hamas for its gesture, obliging Israel on the second day to open the borders and allow aid to come into Gaza, and [Trump would] call for an immediate ceasefire and to go for negotiations to end the war,” Hamas official Basem Naim told Scahill earlier this month. “He did nothing of this,” Naim added. “They didn’t violate the deal. They threw it in the trash.”

This time the trashing was done by the Israelis with the full backing of the equally treacherous Americans. “What I have seen from Hamas is disappointing and completely unacceptable,” Witkoff declared after getting his cue from the Israelis.

He has gone on to sing from a completely different script, talking of a temporary ceasefire, which, he asserts, Hamas must accept. “Israel will agree to a temporary ceasefire that would see half of the living and deceased hostages return, and lead to substantive negotiations to find a path to a permanent ceasefire, which I agreed to preside over,” Witkoff said. “That deal is on the table. Hamas should take it.”

It’s the same Witkoff who described attending Netanyahu’s deceitful address to the US Congress last year as “epic to be in that room.” “It was a privilege to be there”, he told Fox News. “We were standing every five seconds because that crowd was so for him and for the messaging.” It’s no wonder he appears to be acting as Netanyahu’s personal secretary, not a neutral interlocutor out to secure a deal that will put a stop to the live-streamed genocide that is averaging the slaughter of over a hundred Palestinians a day.

Meanwhile, on the same day that the ceasefire story broke and appeared to quietly die, the United States sent its 800th planeload of weapons of mass destruction to Israel since the fast-tracking of what had until then been a slow-moving genocide on October 7.

These transatlantic flights of death and devastation coupled with 140 freight ships have delivered over 90,000 tonnes of American armaments and military equipment to the illegitimate, genocidal entity that has killed hundreds of thousands of defenceless Palestinians, the vast majority of them children and women.

An entity supposedly acting as a mediator while simultaneously supplying planeloads of weapons to one party and speaking on its behalf against the other party is not a serious negotiator by any definition. Indeed, the United States was the guarantor of the January ceasefire with Hamas only to give the Israelis the full license to violate it at will after they collapsed the deal in early March.

The same script is playing out in Lebanon, where, after signing a ceasefire deal in November, the Israelis have gone on to violate it over 3,300 times and continue to occupy several parts of Lebanese territory.

Anyone who takes American guarantees of a ceasefire seriously is deluding themselves, especially when the Israelis have made it crystal clear they have no intention of stopping their ongoing barbarism before Gaza is ethnically cleansed of its native population.

None other than Netanyahu’s official account tweeted it: “We will see to the general security in the Gaza Strip and will allow the realization of the Trump plan for voluntary migration. This is the plan. We are not hiding this and are ready to discuss it at any time.”

Voluntary migration is Israelspeak for ethnic cleansing.

Despite Gaza resembling a wasteland after almost 20 months of non-stop bombardment, the Israelis are not done yet.

Rabbi Avraham Zarbiv, who, Haaretz informs, “is authorized to issue religious rulings under Jewish law and serves as a public official,” recently told his countrymen: “You simply need to flatten [Gaza].”

Also read: When rabbis issue kosher certificates for genocide

To their misfortune, the Palestinians are dealing with two of the most depraved entities that have ever existed. Two entities that aren’t just powerful militarily but also operate an all-encompassing propaganda machine that spins whatever stories they want, no matter how divorced from reality.

It’s worth remembering that one of the many Israeli propaganda points is to tarnish Palestinians as a people incapable of making deals. The Israelis have turned this into another of their duplicitous catchphrases: The Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

Just like hundreds of other carefully crafted, years-long propaganda talking points about the Palestinians, this one too has unravelled in the full glare of the public.

While the Palestinians continue to abide by the tenets of their Islamic faith, which instructs them to honour their promises and uphold agreements, their counterparts display no such morals, ethics, or principles. It is the law of the jungle: barbarism, annihilation.

The seemingly imminent collapse of yet another American-mediated proposal in the service of the genocidal Jewish state is further affirmation that any deal involving the US as a guarantor is worth less than a sheet of toilet paper.

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