“The proposed deal from the Israelis through Witkoff is extremely difficult to accept,” said a senior Hamas official to Drop Site. “There is no talk about the [ceasefire] deal from January 19. There is no talk about a return to the situation before March 2” when Israel abandoned the original ceasefire. The Hamas official said that there is no guarantee Israel would even respect the 60-day truce after its ten captives are returned in the first week of the deal. “They might launch the war again,” he said. “There are no guarantees to a permanent ceasefire, no guarantees for a permanent withdrawal.”
On Thursday, a senior Palestinian resistance figure told Drop Site that Hamas is still debating the language in the draft. He pointed out that the assurances about Trump’s commitment to a long-term ceasefire are not enforceable and that Israel repeatedly violates ceasefire agreements, including the January deal that Trump pushed through before his inauguration. "Releasing half [of the living Israeli captives] within a week and then putting your hopes in Trump is not very reassuring,” he told Drop Site.
Basem Naim, a member of Hamas’s political bureau, told Drop Site earlier this month that the group had received a direct commitment from Witkoff that two days after the release of U.S. citizen and Israeli soldier Edan Alexander, the Trump administration would compel Israel to lift the Gaza blockade and allow humanitarian aid to enter the territory. Witkoff, according to Naim, also promised that Trump would make a public call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and for negotiations aimed at achieving a “permanent ceasefire.”
“He did nothing of this,” Naim said. “They didn’t violate the deal. They threw it in the trash.”
“There are a lot of reservations on this paper as a framework. There are a lot of loopholes. There are a lot of ambiguities,” a Palestinian source close to the negotiating team told Drop Site. “Israel will never agree to end the war under this framework. The number of aid trucks are not mentioned. There are no specifics about where the Israeli forces will withdraw to. All of these are problems which will probably impede this. Witkoff tried to accommodate Israel much more than what was in the earlier paper. It’s going to take some time before a deal gets approved by the movement.”
Some years ago there was a documentary called Mayor about the mayor of the de facto capital of Palestine. I remember they had mediators from like Germany in the negotiation for the Palestinians to build a cemetery and the Israeli negotiator and German mediators telling the mayor that he needs to compromise and satisfy the Israeli demands. Some compromise.
The gist is that there wasn’t really a compromise to be made. The Palestinians wanted to build a cemetery in their city so people could have a place to bury loved ones and the Israeli military that say these people are free and independent are saying no to the people to build a cemetery for non-specific reasons.
There wasn’t anything the Mayor and the people of the city could do to be able to build a cemetery and not be attacked by the Israeli military that had in years past invaded and we’re occupying. It was more like they didn’t want anything built for the local population at all. They were effectively living in captivity with no real self-governance. Freedom could only be had in lands away from their home and that very well may have been the purpose. Before this direct genocide, the method in cool periods was to make life miserable for the native people’s to push them out for Israeli colonizers
With this ‘deal’ Israel would no doubt continue it’s genocidal campaign after 7 days once the hostages are out. And once they are, they would certainly ramp it up even more than the current death and starvation campaign is
‘substack blog’ by the way
Drop Site News and Zeteo do some of the best reporting these days