There’s Got to Be More to This Ceasefire Deal

https://www.persuasion.community/p/theres-got-to-be-more-to-this-ceasefire

> The already beleaguered Palestinian Authority, led by ailing Mahmoud Abbas, is driven into deeper irrelevance. In an extraordinary display of what Palestinians call “Sumud”—steadfastness in resistance to Israel—Hamas lives to regroup, rearm, and carry on the armed struggle against the Jews. Its resilience will surely win it greater Iranian support. Hamas and its junior partner, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), have also just catapulted themselves to the top of the Global Jihad Premier League, inspiring every radical Islamist movement, in Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Syria, Yemen, and beyond. If the agreement is implemented as formulated, terror is rewarded and the incentive to kidnap Israelis and Jews around the world rises sharply. Who needs nuclear weapons when you can bring Israel to its knees by kidnapping 250 of its citizens?

> That deadly dynamic, by which Israel releases large numbers of convicted terrorists only to see them return to murder on an even greater scale down the road, has just been reinforced. Having freed the mastermind of the October 7 massacre, Yahya Sinwar, as part of the Gilad Shalit deal in 2011, Israel has learned nothing and is repeating the same mistake on steroids.

> Since the full implementation of the deal signed leaves Hamas as the governing authority in Gaza—the one controlling organized violence and the distribution of essential public goods throughout the territory—it also amounts to a terrible betrayal of the population that has suffered most under Hamas’s rule: Gazans themselves. The failure to remove Hamas from power means that those who have sustained the greatest loss of life and property since Hamas took control of Gaza in 2006 can look forward to a future defined only by further violence, poverty, oppression, and hopelessness.