Iran’s Gaza war: Ceasefire? What ceasefire?

Allowing Hamas to stay in power will, as its leaders have openly stated, facilitate its mission of carrying out more atrocities against Israel.

By Bassam Tawil, Gatestone Institute

On October 7, 2023, the Iran-backed Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, along with thousands of “ordinary” Palestinians from the Gaza Strip, invaded Israel.

While chanting “Allahu Akbar” (“Allah is the greatest”), they tortured, abused, raped, burned and beheaded, murdering more than 1,200 Israelis, including women, children and babies.

They also kidnapped more than 240 Israelis to the Gaza Strip.

More than 10 months after the Hamas-led atrocities, the Biden administration is continuing to exert pressure on Israel to agree to a ceasefire with Hamas.

Bizarrely, the Biden administration is working with Hamas’s friends in Qatar and Egypt to force Israel to make concessions to the Hamas murderers and rapists, including ending the war against the terror group and abandoning control over the border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt.

Qatar is the only Arab country that has long been hosting and supporting most of the Hamas leaders.

Egypt, meanwhile, has turned a blind eye to the vast network of tunnels dug by Hamas under the border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt over the past two decades.

The tunnels have been used by Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist groups to smuggle weapons and ammunition into the Gaza Strip.

The weapons, including huge numbers of rockets and missiles, were always used for attacks against Israel.

Hamas is now in dire need of a ceasefire because its leaders want to hold on to power in the Gaza Strip.

They seem to have concluded that pressure from the US and the rest of the international community, including Qatar and Egypt, would make it extremely difficult for Israel to resume fighting against Hamas once a ceasefire is reached.

If the Biden-Harris administration and its Iranian, Qatari and Egyptian allies manage to impose a ceasefire on Israel, it will be viewed by many Arabs and Muslims not only as a reward for the October 7 massacres, but specifically as a lifeline for Hamas.

Allowing Hamas to stay in power will, as its leaders have openly stated, facilitate its mission of carrying out more atrocities against Israel.

Senior Hamas official Ghazi Hamad said shortly after the October 7 massacre that Hamas will repeat the October 7 attack, time and again, until Israel is annihilated. Hamad stated:

“Israel is a country that has no place on our land. We must remove that country, because it constitutes a security, military, and political catastrophe to the Arab and Islamic nation, and must be finished. We are not ashamed to say this, with full force…. The Al-Aqsa Flood [the name Hamas uses to describe its attack on Israel] is just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth…”

“The world in its entirety must unite in order to uproot this cancer,” Khalil Al-Hayya, a member of the Hamas political bureau, announced on August 1.

Last week, in a US mediation effort, representatives of the US, Israel, Qatar, and Egypt met in Doha, Qatar, in yet another bid to end the Israel-Hamas war and secure the release of 115 Israeli hostages still being held by Hamas terrorists inside the Gaza Strip.

After the Doha summit, the US, Egypt and Qatar said that the talks were constructive and conducted in a positive atmosphere. All three countries added that they presented Israel and Hamas with a proposal and hope to continue working on the details of the implementation in the coming days.

The Biden-Harris administration seems desperate to reach any deal between Israel and Hamas ahead of the US presidential election on November 5. The administration appears to be afraid that the continuation of the war would alienate Arab and Muslim voters in the US.

Hamas officials, however, were more honest than the Americans, Egyptians and Qataris. These officials were quick to deny any progress in the ceasefire talks and described them as “a waste of time.”

According to reports, Hamas has demanded that the Israeli army completely withdraw from the Philadelphi Corridor between the Gaza Strip and Egypt.

Until recently, Hamas maintained exclusive control over the border, which allowed it to smuggle weapons and ammunition into the Gaza Strip over the past two decades.

Hamas, in addition, insists on releasing the Israeli hostages in phases. It clearly wants to hold on to as many hostages as possible as an “insurance policy” to avoid being targeted by Israel in the future.

Hamas apparently wants the negotiations over the hostages to continue forever, so it can use the time to rebuild its terror infrastructure and prepare for more attacks on Israel.

In Israel, meanwhile, the plight of the hostages has been hijacked by the political rivals of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

They are inciting the families of the abductees to demand a deal with Hamas at any cost, including surrendering to Hamas to end the war, and a full Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.

The Israeli army recently uncovered more than 50 tunnel shafts along the Philadelphi Corridor, which Israeli troops took control of in May.

Since then, the Israeli army has located and destroyed dozens of tunnels, including a 10-foot-high tunnel large enough for vehicles to drive through that was dug directly underneath an Egyptian army position on the border.

Every Palestinian child in the Gaza Strip knows that if Israel is forced to relinquish control of the Philadelphi Corridor, it will effectively lose the war.

Such a move would mean a return to the pre-October 7 era, when Hamas and other Iran-backed terror proxies controlled the border with Egypt and used it to smuggle weapons and ammunition into the Gaza Strip.

A ceasefire now will just allow Hamas to regroup, rearm and prepare for more attacks against Israel. A ceasefire does not mean that Hamas would abandon its plan to eliminate Israel and replace it with an Islamist state.

Hamas remains as committed as ever to its 1988 charter, which begins with this quote from Hassan Al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood organization:

“Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.”

The Biden administration seems to have forgotten that all previous ceasefire agreements were breached by Hamas and its allies in the Gaza Strip.

It also appears to have forgotten that until October 7 there was a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip, albeit an unofficial one.

The most prominent official ceasefire, of course, signed by all the parties involved, was the 1993 Oslo Accord, violated within weeks when PLO Chairman and Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat, according to Avi Dichter, a former Director of Israel’s Shin Bet internal security service, smuggled four arch-terrorists in his car, “[T]hree [of them] were in the trunks of [a separate] Mercedes,” and the fourth – Jihad al-Amarin – “was lying on the back seat with the president of the PA sitting on top of him.”

Months later, on May 19, 1994, at a mosque service in Johannesburg, South Africa, Arafat explained that the Oslo Accord was like the Treaty of Hudaibiyyah.

After the Islamic prophet Mohammed had signed a truce not to attack the Quraish Tribe for ten years, he returned in two years, wiped the Quraish out and conquered Mecca.

The Biden-Harris administration is, sadly, dead wrong if it believes that a ceasefire will open the door to security and stability in the Middle East.

A ceasefire would simply give the Iranian regime and its terrorist allies more confidence, especially when they have nuclear weapons, to pursue their Jihad (holy war) against the Jews and Israel, and then their neighbors in the Gulf.

CeasefireHamasIranTerrorism