Hamas’ New Offer: Hey, How About Some Dead Hostages?

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What a deal! Hamas has a new proposal for a cease-fire, disguised as the former US-negotiated hostage deal, but with a new twist. Now that the Israelis have made it clear that Joe Biden won’t stop them from destroying the remaining Hamas brigades in Rafah, they want to go back to the deal they rejected … as long as the Israelis aren’t too picky about body temperature:

In an announcement detailing the clauses to which it had agreed Monday in the latest proposal for a deal, the terror group said, “During the first phase, Hamas releases 33 Israeli detainees (alive or corpses).”

The New York Times reported Tuesday that the terror group had explicitly told mediators that some of the 33 hostages it would release under the first phase of the prospective deal would not be alive. The Times said it was not clear whether the terror group had informed interlocutors how many of the 33 would be alive.

A failure to release 33 living hostages would appear to conflict with Israeli demands.

Gee, ya think?

So let’s put this in perspective. In the US proposal for an operational pause in fighting a month ago, Israel reluctantly agreed to only 40 hostages returned alive in exchange for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners. Hamas balked at that, claiming that they didn’t have 40 living hostages in their custody that fit the “humanitarian” terms of the proposal — female, sick, and/or elderly. Hamas refused to release hostages from other categories to make up the difference, and Israel balked. 

Under more pressure from the US, Israel then reduced the demand to 33 living hostages, an offer that sat on the table for well over a week before Hamas rejected it. Hamas then punctuated that rejection with a mortar attack on the Keren Shalom aid crossing, killing four Israeli soldiers, which prompted the Israeli government to order the start to the assault on Rafah — which has very quickly cut off Hamas’ main escape route to the Sinai. 

Now they want to make a deal, but not for live hostages. They want full swap credit for the dead hostages, too. 

Not only that, they want Egypt to act as “guarantor” that a three-phase hostage-for-prisoners swap will end the war with Hamas still in charge of Gaza:

Khalil al-Hayya, a deputy to Hamas’s Gaza leader Yahya Sinwar, tells Al Jazeera, “On the first day of the first phase of the agreement, there is a clear commitment to temporarily stop military operations.”

He says the second phase provides for the announcement of “a permanent cessation of military and hostile operations.”

He further says that Egypt is a guarantor of the deal and will not allow the war to return.

This report also claims that Joe Biden has agreed to act as a guarantor to the “permanent” end of the war. Is that true? That claim comes from Hamas, which means it’s unreliable, but it also sounds like something Joe Biden would do, too. And that’s because Joe Biden wants nothing more than to get this behind him before it derails his re-election effort, not because he wants peace. 

The proposed deal makes that clear, because it will bring the opposite of peace. For instance, who would act as guarantor that Hamas wouldn’t start a war? They have broken every single cease-fire agreement they have made with Israel, including the one in place on October 7. Even when supposedly abiding by those cease-fires, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad sent a constant stream of missiles and rockets at Israeli civilian centers. Hamas has tried to have this war for 17 years, and will not hesitate to start it again once it has enough resources to do so. 

Furthermore, what will happen to aid in Gaza if Hamas remains in control? The same as happened for the last 17 years — Hamas will use it to rebuild its military capabilities and tunnel defenses, amass weaponry, and use it as a spoils system to ensure loyalty to their radical Islamist agenda. Why would we want to let that happen? For that matter, why would Egypt and the other Sunni nations allow that to happen? It would create the conditions for another all-out war in Gaza under the frozen-conflict conditions that Hamas has created all along. 

That’s not a peace plan. It’s a plan for perpetual war, at the expense of our ally and the West in general. It’s sheer idiocy, which is why it sounds like a Joe Biden strategy. And one has to wonder whether the Israelis think so too, and decided to launch the Rafah op after the Keren Shalom attack to checkmate Biden’s appeasement plans.

Israel will never accept a deal with these conditions. After October 7, the fantasy of a moderate Hamas has been stripped away forever, and the Israelis understand the existential threat of having Hamas on their border. Any deal that leaves Hamas in place is a non-starter, which is why the Israelis finally took steps to win the war and eliminate that threat permanently rather than wait for the next war to do so. 

The latest episode of The Ed Morrissey Show podcast is now up! Today’s show features:

• Andrew Malcolm and I get to the bottom of a viral Joe Biden clip. Regardless of how some are interpreting it, it’s yet another instance of Biden’s decrepitude on display. That has real-world consequences in foreign policy. 
• We also tackle the lack of consequences in Academia and its consequences for America. 
• Plus, Hamas counts on media malpractice to achieve its strategic goals, and we discuss how that plays out here in the US.  

The Ed Morrissey Show is now a fully downloadable and streamable show at  Spotify, Apple Podcasts, the TEMS Podcast YouTube channel, and on Rumble and our own in-house portal at the #TEMS page!