February 9: False hopes for a Gaza truce

In which, the US fails to broker a deal between Israel and Hamas, Tucker Carlson goes to Moscow, and Iran’s proxy fixation boomerangs back on Tehran.

False hopes for a Gaza truce

Secretary of State Tony Blinken was in the Middle East again this week in another attempt to broker some kind of humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza. The US-Egypt-Qatar draft deal sought to obtain the release of remaining hostages in exchange for a phased ceasefire and humanitarian aid surge. 

Results first: the pitch failed.

The US and Qatar reported, perhaps too optimistically, that Hamas had replied “positively” to the proposal, but then Hamas counter offered with a repeat of its earlier demand of a total Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. Blinken apparently tried to salvage the deal with the Israelis, even appearing to go around Prime Minister Netanyahu, but the Israeli response to the counter offer was a hard “no.”

So, it’s another false start on a ceasefire as a leaked IDF report indicates that a quarter of the remaining hostages are dead with twenty more unaccounted for, and IDF forces press the attack towards Rafah on the Gaza-Egyptian border. 

At this point, the Biden administration really needs to take a hard look at their diplomatic strategy. Relying on Qatar to work out hostage release deals is proving to be unreliable given Qatar’s clear pro-Hamas, pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel stance. Blinksn’s decision to got to Egypt and Qatar first to work on a draft proposal without any clear input from Israel suggests that the US is clearly pivoting away from Israel and towards its Arab allies in the region to navigate this crisis, but this functional isolation of Israel is merely going to make Israel dig in while Hamas ups the demands sensing the same isolation of Israel. In other words, the Blinken-Biden approach is clearly counterproductive and may actually prolong the fighting.