But Hamas and Israel are closer than ever before – the daunting, phased and gradual process of swapping 98 remaining hostages (of whom at least 36 are believed to be dead) for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners in Israel could start any day now.
But it is clear that the incoming administration’s pressure on Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to forego his months-long habit of erecting obstacles to a deal, has been strong. According to Israeli media reports, Trump’s emissary Steven Witkoff, a billionaire property developer with little time for diplomatic or religious niceties, was told that Netanyahu would see him after the Sabbath ended on Saturday evening. Witkoff insisted on a Saturday morning meeting at which he reportedly told the Israeli leader bluntly that delays were no longer acceptable.
The two most extreme right-wing Israeli cabinet ministers, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, remain opposed to a deal. (Unhelpfully for Netanyahu’s hand in the coming blame game over why the deal has taken so long, Ben-Gvir asserted on Tuesday that his opposition and not Hamas, as Netanyahu has repeatedly claimed, was the cause.) But would they really be willing to abandon their considerable power and threaten Netanyahu’s coalition, as they would if both resigned and took their parties out of it?
None of these political consequences will currently be much bothering either the hostages’ families or the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza in dire need of food, water, medicine and shelter.
Darkness is coming in 2025 - it's up to us not to look away
Read MoreAl-Masri and his family, no worse and perhaps better off than many Gazans, have moved eight times since he left his now half-destroyed home in Beit Hanoun; they had to leave the Rafah for the Khan Yunis sector of the coastal Mawasi “humanitarian zone” last month because his tent was damaged by an Israeli military bulldozer demolishing a nearby building.
Meanwhile, Sharone Lifschitz, a London based filmmaker from kibbutz Nir Oz, whose parents were taken hostage on 7 October, spoke this week with quiet eloquence about her hopes for the release of her 84-year-old father Oded and all the other hostages. “I’m trying to breathe; I’m trying to be optimistic,” she told the BBC Today programme.
And since July, she added, so many “hostages died… soldiers, Palestinians, so much suffering”. But she talked movingly about how “profound” it would be to have a longed-for talk to her “opinionated peace activist” father about what he thought and felt.
Needless to say, for Ashraf al-Masri and Sharone Lifschitz, the ceasefire cannot come a moment too soon.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( Netanyahu’s red lines are seemingly not so red after all )
Also on site :