°źÂț”ș

Despite optimism surrounding the latest ongoing round of Gaza ceasefire negotiations, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is still hellbent on sabotaging the talks while using them to buy time and fool US President-elect Trump, several senior officials directly involved in the talks have told °źÂț”ș.

Latest state of affairs

Since July, when Hamas accepted US President Joe Biden’s ceasefire proposal and UN Security Council 2735 while Netanyahu rejected them, the Biden administration on accomplishing a ceasefire in the remainder of his term.

In November, Hamas as Qatar suspended its mediation role, a move meant to create domestic pressure on Netanyahu, per a senior Arab diplomat.

Trump’s team, however, recently asked the Egyptian and Qatari governments to renew their mediation efforts and get a deal done before the Republican president enters office. Subsequently, Hamas’ entire leadership were returned to Cairo and then Doha in early December for talks.

Two of Hamas’ negotiators, however, told °źÂț”ș that the Israeli team didn’t come with anything new in Cairo aside from an offer of a temporary pause in Gaza to release Israeli captives, then resume the war indefinitely.

Hamas’ leadership then left for Doha where they held meetings with the Turkish and Iranian Foreign Ministers and other delegations, but Hamas leader, Bassem Naim, waited in Cairo until the last minute on the evening of 5 December before departing to Istanbul then joining other officials in Doha.

Hamas has become more lenient and compromising than ever before, whether on the terms of the prisoner swap, the field arrangements vis-Ă -vis the timeframe of anÌęIsraeli withdrawal from the Philadelphi and Netzarim corridors and the Eastern buffer zone, and who would run the Rafah crossing and the Gaza Strip during the ceasefire and after the war.

Is Netanyahu fooling Trump?

The senior diplomat told °źÂț”ș that Netanyahu still refuses the principle of a ceasefire but engages in the talks merely “to buy time” and “appease Trump” by pretending that he is complying with the incoming president’s request to get a deal before 20 January.

The diplomat cautioned that Netanyahu’s stalling until Trump gets into office is likely meant to trade the Gaza ceasefire for something substantial, such as annexation of major parts of the West Bank or normalisation with Saudi Arabia.

This explains multiple falsely optimistic statements made by Israel’s Defence Minister and Netanyahu loyalist Israel Katz regarding breakthroughs and a “real chance” to get a deal this time, the diplomat said.

Short-lived hope over serious discussions

Last Monday, however, a glimmer of hope was renewed. "There are serious talks, there is progress and discussions of details, but until today no one presented a final proposal to sign," a senior official directly involved in the negotiations told °źÂț”ș on Tuesday.

"Unless Netanyahu does something that takes us back to square one, there is great optimism that we can reach something within a short period."

The same official denied media reports that Hamas had conceded to a 60-day pause instead of a ceasefire and said the basis of the negotiations remains Biden’s ceasefire proposal from 31 May and its slightly updated formulation from 2 July, which is premised on a three-stage ceasefire, each lasting for six weeks.

The first stage would see the release of 33 Israeli captives and hundreds of Palestinian detainees. This is in addition to an Israeli withdrawal from population centres, allowing one million displaced Gazans to return to the northern half of the enclave, a substantial increase in the flow of humanitarian aid to Gaza, and reopening the Rafah crossing.

The current discussions are focused on the “field details,” the official said. This includes a partial instead of full withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Philadelphi Corridor between Rafah and Egypt, a , the release of female Israeli soldiers in the first phase, and exiling of some high-profile Palestinian detainees.

It’s worth mentioning in previous rounds of negotiations, the Israeli team, Hamas, and the mediators would manage to bridge the gaps and settle on a concrete proposal, but then Netanyahu would torpedo the talks and of his own negotiators telling them “you don’t know how to negotiate”.

Israeli hope a deal could be “reached within two weeks”. However, such hope was again short-lived. A senior Israeli last week that a deal was slipping away because Netanyahu “is not granting a sufficient mandate to the negotiating team”. The official added, “It will not be possible to return everyone without an end to the war”.

Israel’s top newspaper Yediot Ahronoth morning the deal was becoming “not a matter of days, but weeks”. The CIA chief hurriedly in less than a day after failing to make progress, signalling that the renewed round of talks could be collapsing again.

Over the weekend, Palestinian officials said that talks over the three-stage ceasefire were , but sticking points remained.

Biden is re-writing the narrative

When asked what Biden could do in the ‘lame duck’ period of his presidency, the senior Arab diplomat told °źÂț”ș, “He can suspend the arms supplies and he can name and shame Netanyahu for foiling the ceasefire negotiations”.

But the diplomat quickly added that the outgoing Biden administration is instead engaged in an exercise of “rewriting history” where it is putting all blame on Hamas instead of Netanyahu for obstructing the ceasefire.

At a workshop in Geneva in late November, a retired US ambassador who had just returned from meeting senior White House officials claimed, “There are currently three ceasefire deals on the table and Hamas isn’t responding to any of them”.

The veteran diplomat acknowledged the suffering in Gaza but blamed it on Hamas’s “rejection” of ending the war.

Ironically, a former senior Israeli security official in the room rushed to challenge this US narrative, which he described as a “shameful attempt to rewrite history and blame Hamas rather than Netanyahu for the obstruction of ceasefire talks”.

Muhammad Shehada is a Palestinian writer and analyst from Gaza and the EU Affairs Manager at Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor.

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