Reading about the ceasefire negotiations with which the Biden administration hopes to engineer a Hamas victory requires a certain kind of insensitivity to savagery. Hamas seeks to trade kidnapped Israelis for terrorists who can help Hamas finish the task it undertook on October 7. The Hamas terrorists are murderers and genocidaires. The Israelis are, well, you know, Jewish. Hamas seeks ten terrorists in exchange for every kidnapped Israeli and Israel seems okay with the proposition and the ratio.
However, the Israelis declined to show up in Cairo for further negotiations so long as Hamas refuses to provide a list of living kidnap victims. The Israelis assess that 31 of the kidnap victims taken by Hamas on October 7 are now dead. This is either elided in mainstream news accounts or referred to euphemistically as one of the “sticking points.” The Times of Israel summed up the status of negotiations yesterday:
Israel has said that 31 of the 130 hostages held since October 7 are dead. The first phase of the mooted deal is reported to provide for the release of 40 of the living hostages, including women, children, the elderly and the sick, in the course of a six-week truce, and in exchange for some 400 Palestinian security prisoners. The outline reportedly provides for negotiations on the further phased release of the remaining hostages, living and dead, in return for longer pauses in the fighting and many more Palestinian prisoner releases.
On Sunday afternoon, a Hamas official told CNN that the group will not agree to a deal without Israel consenting to an end to the war in Gaza, a non-starter for Israel.
Citing “a highly placed source” in the terror group, CNN reported that the two other areas of disagreement holding up a deal are the withdrawal of IDF troops from Gaza, and Gazan civilians being allowed to return to the northern Gaza Strip.
Vice President Harris found this a good time to hammer Israel yesterday in Selma, Alabama (White House transcript here). Israel is apparently responsible for “the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.” Why, “just a few days ago, we saw hungry, desperate people approach aid trucks, simply trying to secure food for their families after weeks of nearly no aid reaching Northern Gaza. And they were met with gunfire and chaos.” The savages of Hamas have their allies among the idiots, useful or otherwise, of the Biden administration.
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