Middle East Briefing
FOR PAID SUBSCRIBERS: Hamas thinks it won; Iran thinks it has leverage; Abbas thinks he can hang on.
The Trump plan for Gaza — initially advanced through the United Nations system with unusual global alignment — is coming apart, despite a lot of fancy talk from Davos to Doha. Urgent action is needed to avoid a meltdown. In this regard, and quite incredibly — I almost can’t believe I’m writing this — Netanyahu may be useful in his Washington meeting with Trump on Wednesday.
The cease-fire plan purporting to end the devastating two-year war had a central assumption baked in: disarmament. Trump said Hamas promised it though we heard no such thing in public. It has become increasingly clear that it was never real, but the world community has tried to keep that assumption alive.
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At Davos last month, Trump formally launched the “Board of Peace” — like Netanyahu, another absurdity that might in this context be useful — as a vehicle to oversee Gaza’s postwar future. Disarmament was not codified in a binding declaration, but was treated as axiomatic and embedded in every reconstruction scenario. Trump warned that otherwise Hamas would be “destroyed.”
Are they quaking in their sandals? This weekend, at a conference in Doha, Hamas’ inexhaustibly senior official Khaled Mashaal proclaimed that Hamas will not surrender its weapons — not for aid, not for reconstruction, not under any international framework. “Criminalizing the resistance, its weapons, and those who carried it out is something we should not accept,” Mashaal declared, rejecting what he called external “guardianship” and foreign intervention. “Palestinians are to govern Palestinians. Gaza belongs to the people of Gaza and to Palestine. We will not accept foreign rule.”
To be clear: What Mashaal calls the resistence is his cronies’ right to steal the Palestinians’ money and build a police state and rockets and attack tunnels which they used to invade Israel on Oct. 7 and kill over 1,000 people and start a war they could not win. It’s safe to say they don’t care about the resulting misery. He and his tailored suits reside in the Gulf, parading about fancy hotels with climate control, and reveling in this suffering, which they use to perpetuate the narrative of grievance, oppression and “resistence.” Incredibly, some idiots buy this.
Everything about the situation is a tragedy and an outrage. And here’s a plan to fix it.
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