Speakers
Diana Buttu
Palestinian-Canadian Lawyer and Analyst
Mouin Rabbani
Middle East Analyst; Co-Editor of Jadaliyya
Jeremy Scahill
Investigative Journalist and Co-Founder of Drop Site News
Moderator
About the Webinar
After nearly two years of relentless bombing, destruction, and mass atrocities in Gaza, the Israeli government threatens to deepen its military campaign by laying further waste to what remains of Gaza City. Arab Center Washington DC is convening a panel of experts to discuss the current situation on the ground in Gaza and around the world as a growing number of states continue to break with Israel over its conduct in the besieged strip. This panel will highlight the current humanitarian situation in Gaza, the impact of Israel’s siege policies and the politics of aid schemes, the domestic political situation in Israel and how that is shaping Israeli decision-making, the regional and global picture as Israel and the United States become more diplomatically isolated, and what, if anything, remains of ceasefire negotiations.
Among the many questions we will seek to answer are: How have Israel’s policies around humanitarian aid and international organizations led to starvation in Gaza? Has Israel’s military calculus around Gaza shifted after its war with Iran? What divisions inside Israeli decision-making spaces are likely to shape outcomes? What is US policy now toward the situation in Gaza and the Palestinian future? Where do ceasefire negotiations stand now, and what stands in the way of an agreement?
Webinar Transcript
Yara M. Asi
Thank you, Yousef. Thanks, everyone, for being here. I’m really looking forward to learning from my fellow amazing panelists. Yousef, in your opening remarks, you mentioned something about the very future of the Palestinians as a people. I think we’re really at a moment where that is one of the guiding principles of any discussion about Gaza, or any Palestinian suffering across historic Palestine.
Just hours ago, I woke up to the news that al-Manara Square in Ramallah was raided by Israeli tanks. Not that we needed the reminder, but this should serve as a reminder that we’re talking about Gaza today during a period of heightened attack on the Palestinians as a people, no matter where they are in historic Palestine. We really need to see all this contextually, in that framing.
The manifestation is different, obviously, but it is really troubling, and I think it’s a really existential period. Focusing on Gaza, just yesterday—I think probably most of our audience is aware—the attack on Nasser Hospital killed 20 people, including 5 journalists. This follows just about a week after an attack outside al-Shifa Hospital, at the Al Jazeera tent, where they [Israel] killed several journalists as well.
I’ve been writing about the humanitarian situation in Gaza—and Yousef, you and I have talked about this at length on our Hewar podcast—as have many others, for years. It is somehow worse than it has ever been. We are now at the point where the IPC, the Global Famine watchdog, has officially declared famine across the Gaza governorate, which encompasses Gaza City and northern Gaza. We’re seeing reports from humanitarian agencies about malnourished, starving children, pregnant women, and the elderly and disabled. Now it [famine] is spreading to the rest of the population. The assumption is that by September, if conditions do not change significantly, famine will spread. People in Gaza have been telling us that they are hungry for almost two years. Human Rights Watch indicated that starvation was being used as a weapon of war in December 2023.
Famine is a man-made process. Israeli official after Israeli official have essentially told us that they are trying to create [a famine]—and they are. We are at the point where they have been successful in doing so. The question is not really how Israeli policy got to this point but how have so many actors stood on the sidelines and watched a man-made famine develop. When famine is declared, it’s not like we can stop it today [immediately]. We can’t suddenly open the gates for aid, flood all the aid in as people have been calling for, and end it [the famine]. It requires significant, serious intervention for months and perhaps years. We know that famine works this way. Generational costs will be paid for these decisions—or for the lack of decisions that have been made in the past two years. So, how do we talk about this? How do we consider this?
I want to touch on the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, of course. In March [2025], right toward the end of the second ceasefire, Israel imposed a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. They had imposed a siege earlier, of course, shortly after October 7, 2023. But if you look at the data from trucks crossing the border, you will see that in early March 2025 absolutely nothing entered Gaza for almost three months. No food, no medicine, no baby formula, no fuel for generators. Absolutely nothing. We are now seeing the ramifications. What Israel told the world, despite the lack of any evidence, is that they had to create an alternate mechanism, this Gaza Humanitarian Foundation [for aid delivery]—although I have to interrupt to say Israel does not claim that it created this [the GHF]: we now know through investigative journalism that this was a plan created by Israeli and American businessmen as early as 2023 but only implemented in spring 2025. They claim that the aid is stolen [by Hamas], but multiple investigative reports, including internal USAID reports, show that there is no evidence for this. But, as usual, this is the pretext to create further restrictions and even more opportunities for displacement and violence. That’s what we’re seeing.
The so-called “evacuation orders” have multiplied to the point that there is very, very little space left—I think less than 20 percent of Gaza is considered a non-militarized zone. By the standards of the Israeli military, if you are in what they consider to be militarized zone, you are essentially an open target.
I encourage people to read my ACW analysis in late June of the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation and its shady origins and practices. What we know is at least 1,000 Palestinians have been killed at or near [GHF] sites trying to get aid. There have been many videos of people getting shot; there have been testimonies and witness statements from aid workers and health workers on the ground. There is an endless amount of evidence from Palestinians, and also from US contractors working in the Gaza Strip, saying that, essentially, GHF workers have been told to shoot, not just as crowd control, but as a control mechanism, as a threat: ‘if they come before we say [the distribution site] is open, shoot them. If they cross certain lines, shoot them.’ [GHF workers] acknowledge that they are being told this. And we’re seeing this play out in the injuries that are received in local hospitals. A thousand people who are starving, or who are trying to provide food for their starving families, have been killed trying to get that food.
This scene has been called a death zone, or killing fields. Every humanitarian organization has criticized the functioning of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, and recently we saw reports that several [NGOs] had at least attempted to perhaps coordinate with this organization. We still need more details on what exactly happened there.
But the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation replaced the previous UN aid distribution system, however imperfect (as there was still, of course, hunger and deprivation), of more than 400 aid sites all across Gaza—north, central, and south. GHF then concentrated all the distribution to four sites in the southern Strip. This forced displacement—if you’ve seen the photos from the sites—crowding like you wouldn’t believe.
Of course, people were desperate to get food. Which created opportunities for these murders. As of today, there has been no real push by any external actor to dismantle or to delegitimize the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. As we speak, it is still the only source of aid for Palestinians in Gaza.
The UN has shown that it has hundreds, perhaps thousands, of trucks waiting at the border that are unable to come in. So right now, the main issue is famine and continued malnutrition. We’ve already seen at least hundreds of deaths from malnutrition, and also from the consequences of malnutrition. A lot of the deaths are of people whose bodies or immune systems have weakened so much that they’re unable to fight regular infections.
Israel has, of course, cracked down on every other aid group operating in Gaza. UNRWA is probably the primary example, but if you go to the social media of the IDF, COGAT [the IDF unit tasked with overseeing logistical coordination with Gaza] continues to pursue this narrative that they are doing their best to get aid into the Gaza Strip. There are starving people, starving children, with every credible agency in the entire world telling you that they’re trying to get in food—and the Israelis are not letting them. It is dystopian that there is still a narrative that Israel is not withholding aid.
I want to go to how the world is reacting to this very briefly, because I know my co-panelists are going to touch on this. All the murders, the amputations, the tens of thousands of orphans, the paramedics that were murdered, the countless tragic personal stories that we have talked about— I could honestly just go on and on. It seems that the images and the reality of famine and starvation have caused a shift, not significant, but a shift in global perceptions of how Israel is behaving. We’ve seen increased recognition of genocide, including by two Israeli human rights organizations, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights—Israel, a few weeks ago. We have seen increased calls for recognition of a Palestinian state—although without immediate intervention, it is unclear to me how promised recognition of a Palestinian state months from now will stop the famine today. A few days ago, Norway’s largest wealth fund divested from the US Construction group Caterpillar, which has been a prime target of the BDS [Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions] campaign, as well as five Israeli banking groups, and the “unacceptable risk” that these companies contribute to serious violations of the rights of individuals in situations of war and conflict. So, they [the Norwegian wealth fund] are tying this [action] directly to Israel’s actions.
Now, these things tend to happen very slowly, and if you ask many, we are way, way, way too late on these actions. Maybe these [actions] should have been considered decades ago, but it shows that there is potentially some avenue that we may not know of, but that external actors are unwilling to continue to support Israel in this.
Now, does it help the Palestinians today, on the ground? Not fast enough, but I do think—and again, I think my co-panelists will expand on this—there is some push. This shows that the humanitarian situation has become so unacceptable, and has gone on for so long, and the narrative that this is about hostages or about Hamas has been so utterly obliterated, including by statements of Israeli politicians, that there might be some opportunity for movement here. We’re seeing US public opinion in terms of recognizing the genocide significantly change. I saw a poll just released yesterday that showed something like 41 percent of Americans either consider it a genocide or akin to genocide. These are numbers in the US that we are not used to seeing in discussion of Israel. Israel is proving basically all the warnings from early October 2023 absolutely correct. The question is now what it will take to stop them.
Mouin Rabbani
Thank you very much. Thanks to the Arab Center for organizing this event, and to Yousef for moderating it. It’s a real pleasure to be in such august company with my co-panelists. I’d like to briefly speak about, first, the changing strategic environment in the Middle East, and then, second, about recent international responses and what they might mean.
As you may recall, in October of 2023, Israel was caught entirely by surprise. Its security doctrine, and more importantly, the concepts underpinning this doctrine essentially collapsed in the space of a few hours. Chaos and disarray reigned. Israel’s initial response to the Palestinian attacks on southern Israel was essentially governed by the twin motives of bloodlust and revenge, and it was conducted with such ferocity that it was really within a matter of days that we began to hear the first warnings about genocide against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. And of course, [those warnings have] only increased since then. But the point I would like to focus on is that initially, apart from bloodlust and revenge, and statements that it wanted to expel the Palestinian population of the Gaza Strip, there was no clear strategy governing Israel’s actions. It didn’t have a clear, strategic objective.
That began to change, I would argue, in the summer of last year, 2024. Israel began to regain confidence and began increasingly to go on the offensive. I think primarily because of the unlimited support and indulgence from the Biden administration in the US, but also from the European Union and key European states like Britain and Germany, [Israel] began to go on the offensive with a view that it was in a position to fundamentally alter the strategic equation in the Middle East—that it was capable of achieving, and given enough space to achieve, what I would call a 1967 moment: A defeat of its adversaries, individually and collectively. [A victory] so comprehensive that for an entire generation, the Middle East would live in Israel’s image. Now, Israel’s traditional security doctrine is that its enemies must be deterred from ever even thinking of attacking Israel—and if there is going to be an armed conflict, it needs to be short, decisive, and fought on enemy territory.
October 1973, of course, challenged that, but more importantly, October 2023 showed that it was no longer a viable security doctrine. It was replaced by a new [doctrine] in which Israel needed to deal decisively with any emerging or potential threat. Most importantly, it needed to focus on dismantling [the Iran-led] self-proclaimed ‘Axis of Resistance’—first by severing their links with each other, in other words, isolating its various elements from acting in solidarity with the Gaza Strip, and [second] by dismantling them one after the other. From Israel’s perspective, the axis of resistance, as it often says, is an octopus with Iran at its head; we therefore saw the massive attack on Lebanon seeking to neutralize Hezbollah, the growing attacks on [the Houthis] in Yemen, the continuing attacks on Syria, where although Israel claimed credit for the ouster of the Assad regime, I think it was more of a contributing factor, and then ultimately this past June [2025], the war that Israel launched against Iran. Israel is now essentially claiming freedom of action throughout the entire Middle East.
I think the massive attacks against Syria are a case in point. Any state in the Middle East capable of defending itself against Israeli aggression is considered a threat that needs to be neutralized. You will recall when Syria’s new rulers took power in December 2024, they went out of their way to mollify Israel, but this absolutely did not serve them in any way and in no way restrained Israel from seizing additional Syrian territory or seeking to eliminate its entire military capacity. That’s where we are today, where Israel is constantly on the offensive. There’s growing talk of a renewed round of hostilities with Iran, growing talk of a renewed Israeli offensive against Hezbollah and Lebanon, and so on. In doing so, Israel with the full support of the West is essentially seeking to subordinate the entire Middle East to its will; [any] capacity for self-defense among the non-state actors or conventional militaries in the region will be considered an existential threat by Israel and dealt with accordingly.
In the long term, one has to question about how successful such an approach can be. Israel is a fairly small state with a fairly small population, dependent not only on a conscript army, but even more importantly, its reservists. It’s a real question about whether Israeli society, the Israeli economy, and of course, the Israeli military can sustain this kind of strategy. When we look at the Gaza Strip, we see a postage-stamp-sized territory, with a second-order militia, in the case of Hamas, which has already been severely weakened. But two years on, Israel is still fighting. Now, one can of course accept that this [ongoing fighting] masks larger Israeli objectives of the ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip, its potential annexation, and so on. But I think the mere fact that Israel has been unable to achieve its strictly military objectives in the Gaza Strip is telling about the future of its regional strategy. As time goes on, I think we may well find ourselves in the situation where Israel’s western sponsors and allies will either have to invest more and more to keep this Israeli strategy viable or have to increasingly rein [Israel] in to insulate themselves from the consequences of the havoc Israel is wreaking in the Middle East.
We already see, for example, that the Gulf states, which previously saw Israel as a reliable security partner, now increasingly view it as the regional arsonist and are normalizing relations not with Israel, but rather with Iran. That is something to watch moving forward.
In terms of the international response, yes, we have seen growing signs of western governments that, at least at the rhetorical level, are seeking to distance themselves from Israel. Most prominently, of course, the spate of recognition by western governments—either recognition or announcements of an intention to recognize—over the summer [of 2025]. One could say the dam has burst, the West is finally beginning to align its position with the rest of the international community, which largely took this step during the late 1980s. But I think it’s important to look at why this is happening, as Yara pointed out toward the conclusion of her remarks: there has been a fundamental and irreversible sea change in western public opinion toward the question of Palestine. Western publics are increasingly demanding that their governments end their complicity with the Gaza genocide, with Israel’s apartheid against the Palestinian people, and that they take active measures to do so. These governments are of course unresponsive to public opinion. The Western democracies in the 2020s are much less democratic, and much less amenable to public pressure, than they were in decades past. And recognition offers, I would argue, a useful diversion. It allows these states to be seen to be doing something meaningful [instead of] maintaining business as usual. And I think the position of the European Union best exemplifies this. I’m not saying that recognition is meaningless. Symbolic actions can be politically meaningful. But political symbolism without concrete action to accompany it, and to make it meaningful, is ultimately meaningless.
I’d like to just conclude with one anecdote. A few weeks ago, I was invited to speak to a conference that was held in the Slovenian capital, Ljubljana, and before the recording of the talk, I asked my Slovenian hosts, you know, you’re a small and vulnerable country, how do you explain that your government has been so far ahead of other EU member states on the issue of Palestine and the Gaza genocide. The answer I received was that there had recently been a change of government in Slovenia. The government that was installed basically won the elections on the strength of support from civil society organizations, NGOs, unions, and so on. Slovenia’s current leaders are keenly aware that they are dependent on this coalition for their survival in office. Because of that vulnerability, if I can use that word, they are much more receptive to public opinion and the priorities of public opinion than other governments, for example, the US, which is basically now a plutocracy with voting rights. And so this shows that political change does come, and can come, with proper organizing—but it is also a cautionary note. Policies are not going to change simply because public opinion wants them to. It requires effort. It requires strategic thinking. And unfortunately, it requires time as well.
Diana Butto
Thank you. First, I wanted to also thank the Arab Center, and I wanted to thank you, Yousef, for inviting me. I also wanted to thank Jeremy, Mouin, and Yara for being so generous with your time and with your thoughts. I look forward to hearing from all of you. Yousef has asked me to focus on what’s going on internally among the Israeli public. I’m going to focus on that but will bring in some other elements as well.
Just over a month ago, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights—Israel, two Israeli human rights organizations, came out with their reports classifying for the first time that what Israel’s doing [in Gaza] is genocide. When they issued their reports, I wrote about [..] their reports, expressing both thanks but also shock and dismay that it took an organization like B’Tselem 22 months into the genocide for them to call it a genocide.
Why am I bringing this up now? For the simple reason that I think that it’s been obvious to anybody who’s been watching that what Israel has been doing is genocide. But more than being obvious to anybody who’s watching, it’s clear in the way that B’Tselem and these [other] organizations have written their report that they view the events of October 2023 as the catalyst, as they would put it, for genocide. I mention this because I think that since the very beginning that Israel has always had a strategy of carrying out genocide. I think that has been the strategy since day one.
There have been a number of lawyers and others who, within the first month of Israel’s [war on Gaza] labeled it as a genocide because we knew, we saw, and we listened to exactly what it is that Israeli officials were saying, in addition to what the Israeli public was saying. I mention this because here we are now 22, almost 23, months later, and that position has not changed. The only thing that we have seen that has changed within Israeli society is that there are now two main camps that have formed within Israeli society. But neither one of these camps is a camp that is firmly anti-genocide, with very few exceptions.
The first camp—which is the camp that we perhaps see the most, because it gets covered by international news a lot—is the weekly, sometimes now daily, protests, the protest movement that we’re seeing primarily in Tel Aviv and other major cities. In this protest movement, there are people demanding that Israel reach a ceasefire agreement, end the war, and so on. It is very important to mention that a lot of the coverage that we’re seeing is actually overblown. There are, yes, there are people who are in the tens, and in some cases, the hundreds of thousands, who are going out to protest, but just in the same way that we had hundreds of thousands of people in the tents protesting the “reform process” that the Israelis had been intending to carry out from the start of 2023 up until the genocide began in October of 2023. This is not a protest movement that is in any way, shape, or form disciplined—or that looks at things from the perspective of what it means to be a Palestinian. What this protest movement is about is simply about, as they would put it is bringing back Israeli soldiers, Israeli captives.
This is becoming very costly, very embarrassing for Israel because of the growing international movement. They also don’t like the fact that their soldiers have been going repeatedly into Gaza.
The second main camp, which we don’t really see a lot being covered on the news, is the majority camp inside Israel. And that is the camp that is firmly onside with supporting this genocide. Now, in this second camp there are splits. There may be some people who join the protest movement, but for the most part, these are people who actually agree with the idea of wiping Gaza off the map. We see this insofar as we’ve seen opinion poll after opinion poll that says that 82 percent of Israelis support the complete ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza. If you look at the numbers of people who are under the age of 40, we see 60-something percent also support the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians who hold Israeli citizenship, ethnically cleansing them from the state as well.
This is all to say that it would be a huge mistake for us to focus—as many in the media have done, and as many members of Congress have done—[on] Netanyahu and Netanyahu’s war. This isn’t just Netanyahu’s war, and this isn’t just about Netanyahu. This is very much a policy on the part of the government and on the part of the state itself to finish off the job that they [started] in 1948. And so the critique that I have of B’Tselem calling October 7 the catalyst [for genocide] is that it’s actually a pretext. The idea of genocide has long sat within the psyche of the Israelis and within the Israeli state. They’re now using this opportunity to push forward [with that idea].
Where does this leave Palestinians who hold Israeli citizenship? We’re now beginning to see that there are many more protests, protests of people who are genuinely seeking an end to this genocide, including Palestinians who hold Israeli citizenship, who are now being allowed to go protest and are starting to protest en masse. Unfortunately, this will not be enough to stop Israel’s actions. Quite the contrary. The Israeli government is forging on ahead. They know that they have a green light to continue. At best, it’s going to be a scenario in which they seek forgiveness rather than seeking permission to carry out genocide.
Where does this leave the PA? This was the other question that Yousef asked me to talk about. The PA has spent the entire nearly two years keeping its head down in the hope that somehow they won’t be the target of the next phase of Israel’s genocide. Someone should break the news to them—maybe it should be me, maybe you, maybe everybody here—and say ‘you’re next!’ because the Israelis have made it absolutely clear that the PA, in its current form is not going to be around for much longer. The actions that Israel has been doing, everything from the theft of land in the Jerusalem area (which people commonly refer to as E1) to the wholesale destruction of the refugee camps in Jenin, Tulkarm, Nur Shams, Ain al-Fari’a, and other parts of the West Bank, is only going to continue. And the Israelis have made it clear that alongside this process of, you know, fake recognition—I don’t know what to call it—they’re going to continue to forge ahead to make sure that this recognition is simply recognition on paper, and one that Palestinians pay for very dearly. This is all to say that we are in a moment in which, while the world is recognizing that this is genocide and Israelis are finally recognizing that this is genocide, we still lack the tools to be able to stop it. In fact, it would be a mistake to think that the Israelis want to stop it. It is quite the contrary. Many of them are very happy with where we are right now.
Jeremy Schahill
I just want to co-sign all of the words of gratitude from our fellow panelists to the Arab Center. It’s really an honor to share this stage with all of you because I’ve interviewed all of you as analysts for investigative stories or analytical stories that I’ve done and consider you some of the finest minds that we’ve had not just during this genocide but on the whole history of the Palestinian liberation struggle. So I just want to express my deep gratitude to each and every one of you and to those of you that are joining today [as the audience]. A lot of the reporting that I’ve been doing over the course of the past 22 months has focused on trying to understand the perspective of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. I think that there’s been a cartoonized version of what their aims were on October 7, 2023, of the leadership of these organizations, on the people that are waging the armed struggle on the ground in Gaza and in the occupied West Bank. What we’ve witnessed throughout the duration of this genocide under both the Democratic presidency of Joe Biden and the Republican MAGA presidency of Donald Trump is the United States conspiring with Israel to ensure that there will not be a ceasefire deal.
Looking back, we can now say with great clarity that a major part of the charade of negotiations has been to extend Israel’s free rein to conduct its scorched earth terror bombing aimed at exterminating the Palestinian people from Gaza, as Diana just said.
Increasingly [Israel’s] target sights are set on the occupied West Bank. We’re talking at a moment when it seems clear that Israel wants to sever it completely in half, ahead of a potential full annexation of large portions—if not the entirety—of the occupied West Bank. It’s a gravely serious situation which is accentuated by the fact that the Trump administration—while it does have some complicated political dynamics, and while there certainly are some players that could be categorized as falling into the anti-interventionist [camp] or even in some cases maybe include people who are opposed to the US underwriting of Israel’s military might—is an administration dominated by very rabid Zionists. This is personified in the [US] ambassadorship [to Israel] of Mike Huckabee, who has said that there’s no such thing as a Palestinian, no such land as the West Bank. That’s the backdrop against which we’ve been watching this negotiation charade unfold.
It’s important to state for the record that within the very first days after October 7, 2023, the Hamas leadership — including Yahya Sinwar himself, the late leader of Hamas and one of the most important figures in the decision to launch Operation Al-Aqsa Flood—wanted to make a comprehensive deal [with Israel]. [The Hamas leadership] was willing, and I think it was genuine—it certainly has been genuine at other times during these past 22 months—to do an all-for-all deal.
Remember: history didn’t start on October 7. There is an arc of history that is 76 years long— you can even go back before that and talk about the British occupation. The Palestinian leadership of these organizations is not just looking at the current reality of the last few years. They recognize—and they make it clear—that they’re operating in an arc of history that is many decades long. Hamas has repeatedly offered over the years to various officials and institutions a “hudna”—long-term truce—to Israel.
There’s been almost no Western news coverage of this as it’s written off as some cynical rhetoric that’s been delivered by Hamas. I think that there is often a cartoonish portrayal of the leadership. But many of the people who run Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas are highly educated; some were educated in the West, but most of them can tell their entire life stories through a biography that is marked by occupation, apartheid, wars of annihilation with so-called ‘mowing the lawn.’ [Take] Yahya Sinwar’s biography. He grew up in the Khan Younis refugee camp and spent two decades in an Israeli prison. Sinwar became fluent in Hebrew; he studied the memoirs of the former heads of Shin Bet and other Israeli intelligence services and then distributed Arabic-language versions of them to other prisoners. People can have whatever opinion they want but make sure that it’s based on facts and an understanding that if you didn’t have Hamas, you would have other Palestinians that would pick up the gun to wage the exact same battle. Now Israeli society, as Diana so eloquently put it, is singularly focused on just the issue of getting Israeli captives back. At the same time, Jewish Israelis overwhelmingly support the war of erasure against the Palestinian people.
Let’s talk about captives, let’s talk about hostages. Recently, we learned that there may be as many as 15,000 Palestinians currently held by Israel. As many as 4,000 of them were kidnapped by Israel after October 7, 2023, for the explicit purpose of using them in exchange deals. You want to talk about the holding of dead bodies? There are believed to be some 20 deceased Israeli captives held in Gaza. But Israel is holding hundreds of Palestinian bodies, some of them in freezers, some of them in graves marked only by numbers. When the second ceasefire deal was signed on January 17, 2025, I believe the only reason that Israel agreed was because Netanyahu received secret side letters from both outgoing President Joe Biden and incoming President Donald Trump saying that the United States would support Israel if it decided to continue the genocide, if that was in its best interests. Yes, there was political pressure. Yes, Trump showed a willingness to force this deal that the criminals from the Biden administration actively refused to do. But let’s not pretend that Trump had benign motives. The fact is that when Israel decided to unilaterally blow up the ceasefire on March 2, 2025, and then impose this genocidal siege on Gaza prohibiting any life essentials [coming in] to the Gaza Strip, it did so with the full support of Donald Trump. On March 18, 2025, [Israel] resumed a scorched-earth terror bombing campaign that on its opening night killed hundreds of people. On a daily basis Israel is burning children alive in tents and is imposing a forced starvation campaign that is intentionally trying to destroy any remnant of the cities that once stood in Gaza. I and my colleague at DropSite News, Jawa Ahmad, have been reporting on this. We’ve obtained almost every single version of the ceasefire deals that have been put before Hamas in this process. I know this material very well and we speak regularly to the negotiators from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
Hamas has made an extraordinary series of major concessions in the last 10 days or so, but it’s gotten almost no attention whatsoever. We published the terms of it. Just to run through quickly what Hamas has agreed to: In this current version, which is a 13-point framework that was drafted not by the regional mediators from Qatar and Egypt, but by Steve Witkoff and Netanyahu’s political hitman Ron Dermer. Hamas tried to amend the language in three of those points but they accepted 10 of them, even if they were swallowing poison pills from their perspective. What Hamas has now agreed to is something that they have not during these negotiations: They have dropped their explicit demand that Israel withdraws from the Philadelphi corridor in the south of Gaza. This was something that Netanyahu had [earlier] defined as one of his red lines and the regional mediators particularly from Egypt told Hamas would be a sticking point. I’m told by sources involved with the negotiations that the Egyptians made a commitment to Hamas that they would deal with the issue of a withdrawal from the Philadelphi corridor on a bilateral basis.
Because of the treaties that exist between Egypt and Israel, Hamas has a lot of reasons to be suspicious of Egypt, particularly under Sisi’s administration. The democratically elected president of Egypt, Mohammad Morsi, died in a prison cell after a coup that brought Sisi to power. Sisi is no friend of Hamas, but they agreed to that. They took out language that would have had an entire withdrawal from the Philadelphi corridor within 50 days of signing a deal. They also adjusted their position on the influx of humanitarian aid and other life essentials to the Gaza Strip. Hamas has said—and Yara touched on this—that it wants to go back to the system defined in the January ceasefire agreement in which hundreds of trucks a day would be brought in and the distribution would be overwhelmingly coordinated and run by the United Nations.
In the original drafts of these ceasefires, Israel didn’t even mention the United Nations; they just wanted it to be negotiated at a later point. What Hamas did in the last concessions that they made is that in July they said we want language that says only international organizations that were operating in the Gaza Strip before March 2, 2025, can be involved with aid distribution. They explicitly demanded the dismantling of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation [distribution] sites.
That is now gone from the agreement that they signed, which means that the door is open for the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation—despite the fact that its operations have resulted in the killing of at least 1,000 Palestinians. Some estimates indicate 2,000 Palestinians, if you look at the broader scheme of the way aid is coming in. But Hamas has dropped that [demand].
They also reduced their demands on the number of Palestinians serving life sentences who would be freed in these exchange deals. They originally wanted 200, but they’ve dropped it to 140 and said that we’ll allow 60 Palestinians serving 15 years or more to replace those. They also cut by 500 the number of Palestinian hostages that were taken after October 7, 2023, explicitly to be used in these deals. One of the main aims of Al-Aqsa Flood was to free as many Palestinian hostages/captives/prisoners as possible.
And so Hamas has hit a point now where I think that part of the motivation for accepting these concessions was because Hamas and Islamic Jihad are under enormous pressure from inside Gaza. Israeli pressure is secondary, no matter what Donald Trump’s Truth Social account wants to say.
Major families and clans in Gaza, as well as the family members of the external Hamas political leadership, are putting unprecedented pressure on them to make a deal. On the one hand, Hamas has said ‘yes, ok we are going to strip this down to the basement. We are conceding everything we can short of surrendering the Palestinian cause of liberation’—because that’s what they believe the stakes are here. It’s not about Hamas. Hamas has said for months we will resign from government. They put it in writing in the ceasefire proposals. Witkoff took it out. Israel took it out. Ask yourself why. At the end of the day, what we’re witnessing right now is Hamas doing two things.
First, [Hamas] is saying here’s the bare minimum [of what it can agree to]. If Israel won’t accept this, they won’t accept any deal. On the other hand, they’re saying let’s test this. Does Israel really want its captives back? Did Israel really believe in the 13-point framework that they put before us months ago after they unilaterally blew up the ceasefire deal, or do they want something else? The news of the past 48 hours is Israel saying they’re not going to negotiate any more in Egypt or in Qatar and want a third country [location]. They’re also not going to negotiate on the Witkoff plan—which they had been demanding Hamas accept. Now that Hamas has accepted it, they say ‘no, we need to start over.’ But it has to be an all-for-all deal, meaning a comprehensive deal.
These maximalist demands by Israel are all part of the charade I mentioned at the beginning of this [presentation]. The whole aim of dragging out these negotiations is not to get concessions from Hamas. It’s to kill more Palestinians. It’s to do more scorched earth. It’s to make Gaza even less inhabitable, even if the unthinkable happens and somehow Trump were to force the end of this war.
What they did to Rafah, they want to do to Gaza City; Deir al-Balah is next. While Jawa [Ahmad] and I are reporting on this all the time because we think it’s in the public interest, we are very clear about what’s happening here. What’s happening is that they [Israel] are using the veneer of negotiations to extend their genocidal serial killing rampage against people who happen to be born Palestinian.
Featured image credit: Shutterstock/Anas Mohammed
