Israel's government and Hamas agreed on Wednesday to a four-day pause in fighting to allow the release of 50 hostages held in Gaza in exchange for 150 Palestinians imprisoned in Israel, and the entry of humanitarian aid into the besieged enclave.

GAZA/TEL AVIV, Nov 22 (Reuters) - Israel’s government and Hamas agreed on Wednesday to a four-day pause in fighting to allow the release of 50 hostages held in Gaza in exchange for 150 Palestinians imprisoned in Israel, and the entry of humanitarian aid into the besieged enclave.

  • AndyEnglish
    50•1 year ago

    This is such good news. Now the challenge is to keep both sides from reigniting.

    I don’t really know what Hamas and Haniyeh and Sinwar want, so it’s hard to speculate what they’ll do, but I know that Netanyahu is trying to reignite the war as hard as he can, and will be desperate to see the ceasefire ended prematurely under circumstances he can blame on Hamas.

    For those who haven’t followed his career (and his actions in the least week in particular) this seems abundantly clear. The absolute worst thing that could happen to him would be a deescalation that leads to an political negotiations. I really hope the US antiwar movement is prepared to increase their pressure, because I believe it’s made the difference in getting us this far. As furious as I’ve been at Biden’s response, I have read multiple reports that the US was far more involved in hostage negotiations than Israel, so I will give Biden this sliver of credit if people actually come home. But he really needs to stop propping up Bibi if he wants to land this plane for real.

    • hydro033
      24•1 year ago

      I don’t really know what Hamas and Haniyeh and Sinwar want

      Are you serious? They want the complete destruction of Israel. Have you never read anything Hamas has put out?

      • PugJesus
        13•1 year ago

        I think they might mean “want in an immediate sense”. Even Hamas isn’t deluded enough to think that they’re capable of destroying Israel at this moment.

        • Alto
          7•1 year ago

          No, but they knew exactly what the Israeli reaction would be, and that said reaction would end up providing a wave of freshly minted fighters.

          • PugJesus
            7•1 year ago

            Yeah, but I mean, what is their goal now? Like, in the next few months kind of immediate, the kind of immediate that would cause them to accept a truce? Freshly minted fighters don’t mean much if Israel gets away with ethnic cleansing, after all.

            • @Mrkawfee@lemmy.worldEnglish
              6•1 year ago

              Goal now is to get Israel to withdraw and use hostages to extract concessions including the release of kidnapped Palestinians in Israeli jails and humanitarian aid for beleaguered civilians. The military hostages are probably the highest value from a negotiation standpoint and will be kept the longest.

      • Alto
        7•1 year ago

        There’s a handful of people that really don’t want to acknowledge that

        • @jaybone@lemmy.worldEnglish
          -2•1 year ago

          And these 150 prisoners are Hamas terrorists that will be exchanged for 50 innocent civilians.

          So hamas will have more terrorists on their side to fan the flames for Netinyahu’s next response.

          • @neeshie@lemmy.worldEnglish
            4•1 year ago

            They’re Palestinian women and children, not terrorists. It’s a trade of innocents for innocents

            • @LaLiLuLuCo@lemmy.caEnglish
              7•1 year ago

              13 women mostly convicted of stabbings.

              Edit: 33 women are on the list of 300 total, I counted the Hebrew source material myself. 15+ is of those with stabbing charges and convictions or general attempted murder.

              Overwhelming majority of minors did fucked up shit.

              https://www.gov.il/he/Departments/DynamicCollectors/is-db?skip=0

              https://www.timesofisrael.com/palestinian-just-convicted-of-stabbing-her-neighbor-may-be-freed-in-hamas-deal/

                • @LaLiLuLuCo@lemmy.caEnglish
                  -1•1 year ago

                  OK, terrorist. Attempting murder is bad.

                  They picked this set because Hamas asked for this set. The actual convicted murders weren’t allowed to be released.

                  There’s no hostages in Israel, there’s people being processed by the courts. If you think the wait times are bad go check out Japan and claim they have hostages, or the US prison system with constitutional slave labor and barely any public defenders with the largest per capita prison pop in the world.

                  There’s something like 50 women total held.

                  All of these people get charged there’s a reason almost no one on the list is there for more than 2 years without being tried in civil court. The military tribunal cases convert over when they get processed. They were charged and their charges are listed in the database.

                  • @neeshie@lemmy.worldEnglish
                    1•1 year ago

                    I mean if anti settler violence is terrorism then yea I wholeheartedly support terrorism. Settlers should not be there.

                    Also idc who does it. If someone is held without charges in prison, they’ve been taken hostage by the state.

            • @jaybone@lemmy.worldEnglish
              -3•1 year ago

              They are terrorists.

              Israel didn’t kidnap them for no reason. Unlike what Hamas does.

              Go vote for Trump and believe in fake news.

              • @neeshie@lemmy.worldEnglish
                1•1 year ago

                The over a thousand people held without charges would disagree with you. Are trusted human rights organizations fake news now?

        • @steventhedev@lemmy.worldEnglish
          21•1 year ago

          Do you mean this part:

          1. Hamas believes that no part of the land of Palestine shall be compromised or conceded, irrespective of the causes, the circumstances and the pressures and no matter how long the occupation lasts. Hamas rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea.

          Or perhaps this part:

          1. Resisting the occupation with all means and methods is a legitimate right guaranteed by divine laws and by international norms and laws. At the heart of these lies armed resistance, which is regarded as the strategic choice for protecting the principles and the rights of the Palestinian people.

          Oh wait, there’s more:

          1. A real state of Palestine is a state that has been liberated. There is no alternative to a fully sovereign Palestinian State on the entire national Palestinian soil, with Jerusalem as its capital.

          They define “Palestinian soil” earlier:

          1. Palestine, which extends from the River Jordan in the east to the Mediterranean in the west and from Ras Al-Naqurah in the north to Umm Al-Rashrash in the south, is an integral territorial unit. It is the land and the home of the Palestinian people. The expulsion and banishment of the Palestinian people from their land and the establishment of the Zionist entity therein do not annul the right of the Palestinian people to their entire land and do not entrench any rights therein for the usurping Zionist entity.

          They have only 1 segment that even hints that they might accept a 2 state solution:

          However, without compromising its rejection of the Zionist entity and without relinquishing any Palestinian rights, Hamas considers the establishment of a fully sovereign and independent Palestinian state, with Jerusalem as its capital along the lines of the 4th of June 1967, with the return of the refugees and the displaced to their homes from which they were expelled, to be a formula of national consensus.

          Which is pretty hard to take at face as an acceptance of a two state solution when it literally says in the sentence before that that they reject any alternative other than “from the river to the sea” and in the sentence after completely reject the Oslo accords.

        • @Mrkawfee@lemmy.worldEnglish
          -2•1 year ago

          Yes Israel paints them as Nazi Isis but it’s more accurate to view them as the Viet Cong. They are fighting an anti colonial war.

      • AndyEnglish
        -2•1 year ago

        This is so dumb and reductive, though.

        First, that goal is like trying to drink the ocean. It’s obviously impossible, so it’s not useful as an indicator for what they’ll agree to.

        Second, we hear this over and over, but the only citation is their founding document over thirty years ago. And in 2006 they went through a moderate rebrand, and then a lot of people in the org died, and Sinwar spent two decades in Israeli prison, so… that doesn’t really tell us where they’re at in this moment.

        Folks act like they’re orcs. Just mindlessly evil. They’re definitely completely ruthless, but the stuff they do isn’t that different from what the IRA did, and they still made peace. So what does Sinwar want? Has anyone thought to ask?

    • @randon31415@lemmy.worldEnglish
      11•1 year ago

      Netanyahu: “We have creditable evidence that Hamas is experimenting with atomic weaponry. If nothing is done within 300 years, Hamas will have nukes!”

    • Hatsune Miku English
      3•1 year ago

      This is such good news. Now the challenge is to keep both sides from reigniting.

      There was a ceasefire already in place prior to the 7th of October attacks