Biden administration officials have leaked to NBC News that they are considering making a separate peace with Hamas in exchange for the terrorists’ American hostages:
Biden administration officials have discussed potentially negotiating a unilateral deal with Hamas to secure the release of five Americans being held hostage in Gaza if current cease-fire talks involving Israel fail, according to two current senior U.S. officials and two former senior U.S. officials.
Such negotiations would not include Israel and would be conducted through Qatari interlocutors, as current talks have been, said the officials, all of whom have been briefed on the discussions.
This leak is evidently intended to put more pressure on Israel’s government to go along with a Hamas victory.
The Biden administration has said it believes Hamas is holding five American hostages who were abducted during the Oct. 7 terrorist attack on Israel. U.S. officials are also hoping to recover the remains of three additional U.S. citizens who are believed to have been killed on that day by Hamas, which then took their bodies into Gaza.
Yes, how about that. The Biden administration has been shamefully inert for eight months now. If you weren’t following the news carefully, you likely wouldn’t even know that some of Hamas’s captives are Americans. A competent American administration would have told Hamas to release all Americans immediately, or we would not be as gentle with them as the Israelis are.
What would we give up in exchange for the five Americans? Probably nothing:
The officials did not know what the United States might give Hamas in exchange for the release of American hostages. But, the officials said, Hamas could have an incentive to cut a unilateral deal with Washington because doing so would likely further strain relations between the U.S. and Israel and put additional domestic political pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
That would be the point, obviously. This is pretty candid:
One of the former officials said the internal discussions have also taken place in the context of whether the possibility of the U.S. cutting a unilateral deal with Hamas might pressure Netanyahu to agree to a version of the current cease-fire proposal.
Hence the present leak. We can only hope that Benjamin Netanyahu’s government will ignore this latest treachery from Washington and pursue the war to total victory.
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