Weirdly, the people who have been calling for a ceasefire have been rather quiet
Hamas accepts Trump peace plan ending 2 years of war in Gaza, returning hostages
Hamas has agreed to a peace deal pushed by President Donald Trump to end the war in Gaza and return the hostages, two years after the terrorist network attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, sparking not only the bloodiest day for Jews since the Holocaust, but a deadly war and a humanitarian crisis across the Gaza Strip.
Trump took to Truth Social Wednesday to make the announcement: “I am very proud to announce that Israel and Hamas have both signed off on the first Phase of our Peace Plan. This means that ALL of the Hostages will be released very soon, and Israel will withdraw their Troops to an agreed upon line as the first steps toward a Strong, Durable, and Everlasting Peace. All Parties will be treated fairly! This is a GREAT Day for the Arab and Muslim World, Israel, all surrounding Nations, and the United States of America, and we thank the mediators from Qatar, Egypt, and Turkey, who worked with us to make this Historic and Unprecedented Event happen. BLESSED ARE THE PEACEMAKERS!”
Speaking to Sean Hannity, Trump said he expects the hostages to be released on Monday. He did not elaborate on whether he would be going to the region, although Netanyahu invited him to address the Israeli parliament on Sunday. (snip)
Israeli media reported Israel and the terror group will sign the deal Thursday in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh.
I guess now we wait to see if Hamas actually releases the 48 hostages, for which 21 are reportedly still alive. And then see if Hamas follows the terms of the peace deal going forward. Palestinians aren’t exactly known for sticking to agreements. Hopefully they will. If the pro-Palestinian people and countries want peace they need to push Hamas and the rest to stick to the agreement.
(Jerusalem Post) Israel conceded on ending the war without having fully disarmed Hamas: This is Israel’s largest concession long-term Netanyahu early on in the war said he would not end the war until Hamas was “annihilated” and much later altered his goal to completely disarmed.
No one believes that Hamas will be fully disarmed with the war ending at this point. Hamas’s military numbers range from 2,000-2,500 hardcore fighters to 20,000 or so less well-trained potential fighters, to a support base within Gaza of around 700,000 Palestinians who associate themselves with the movement by tribe or ideology.
That is the bad news.
The good news is that all 24 of Hamas’s battalions were already militarily defeated by August 2024. There is now no Hamas army and has not been for over a year. What remains are loosely aligned small guerrilla warfare cells. The top achievements of these groups have been to penetrate two Israeli forward positions in Gaza in the last two months, leading to Israeli casualties, but only in those penetrated positions, and not beyond them, let alone anywhere near Israeli civilian areas.
They have also managed to keep up low-grade rocket fire at Gaza border villages, firing one to two rockets at a time, which have not been causing casualties. So what is left of Hamas cannot, for the near future, and probably not even the medium term, threaten another major invasion of Israel or large-scale rocket attacks. But there are still many dangerous people in Gaza, and they could grow and reconstitute themselves if not properly neutralized.
This is where leaders and nations that have whined at Israel need to step in and work to make sure Hamas doesn’t reconstitute and start attacking Israel. Doesn’t get shipments of weapons from Iran, doesn’t take water pipes and turn them into rockets, etc. Or some other Islamic terrorist group steps in. Israel does not want to attack. Leave them alone, and Gaza won’t get annihilated again.
Anyhow, I’ve yet to see any of the Credentialed Media congratulate Trump or anything. Where are the hyper-pro Hamas people on this? The ones who called for a ceasefire, like Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib? Why are they not celebrating? It’s almost like they do not actually want a ceasefire. Like they want Hamas to keep fighting.
William typed: I’ve yet to see any of the Credentialed Media congratulate Trump or anything.
Bologna. Stop whining – it’s unbecoming and tiresome. I doubt that he watches MSNBC, CNN, PBS etc. The media is not responsible for giving politicians pats on the back, but that said, opinionists can! Read on.
WaPo’s left-winger David Ignatius was all over the “Credentialed Media” this AM singing hosanna’s to President Trump, claiming no other president could have done this. He even roasted Biden for being ineffective.
Ignatius hailed President Donald Trump for achieving in his Gaza peace deal what former President Joe Biden “could never do.”
“This war was blocked for two years. President Biden, who preceded him, was unable to find a way to stop it. President Trump found that way by being tough on both sides. And he will take a victory lap for sure over the next few days, but it’s deserved. There’s no way that I can see that this would have been done without Trump’s pressure in the final hours.”
“… on the two sides of that, I can remember in the month or so after October 7, an Israeli senior official saying to me, we are so disoriented and traumatized by this war. The United States is going to have to make decisions for us. Joe Biden could never do that. And Donald Trump was able to do it. And [he] did it at the decisive moment when he said, essentially, this war must end and Israel cannot annex the West Bank, which many right wing Israelis wanted.”
“if anybody was going to be able to resolve” the conflict, “it would be Donald Trump.”
Ignatius praised President Trump for showing regional leaders in the Middle East that he was “serious” about peace while “quietly” sending his team and “unlikely emissary” Steve Witkoff to work “behind the scenes week by week” toward a final 20-point peace plan.
“That is something that Joe Biden, for all his desire for peace, wasn’t able to do.”
And it was the media who reported this from Putin:
“We very much hope that these initiatives of the U.S. president will actually be realised in practice.”
Far left PBS gave Trump and his team credit!!
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/israel-and-hamas-agree-to-first-phase-of-deal-to-end-gaza-war
As did the far, far left The Atlantic!!
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/10/trump-hostages-gaza/684498/
I, for one, will wait and see if this deal is fully implemented. That the hostage release is the first step should mean, if there’s any rationality left in Hamas, that they intend to follow through with the rest, because the hostages are Hamas’ only point of leverage.
But whether this deal is completed or not, I don’t foresee any lasting peace. Looking at the timeline, we see Arab attacks against the Jews in 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973, just the cycle for the 10 and 12 and 14 year old boys, too young for the previous war, to get old enough to try to do what their candy-assed fathers couldn’t. Raised on resentment and hate, but not having gotten beaten themselves, they grew up thinking they could be the generation which succeeds.
This time has been different, however, as Israel unleashed so much Hell on Gaza that perhaps the growing generation of boys will be so terrorized that they won’t try it, but eventually children will grow up without memories of what happened to Gaza, and they’ll rise up and try again.
And let’s not kid ourselves: Israel won this war due to Benjamin Netanyahu, who was strong-willed and smart enough not to give the Arabs a cease-fire until they were thoroughly, thoroughly beaten. The wars in 1967 and 1973 were ended too soon, leaving too much of the Arab armies intact and alive and able to rearm. Fortunately, the Arab nations still learned the lesson, and the Arab nations never again attacked Israel, but the various terrorist groups kept at it. Hamas had hoped, perhaps even believed, that if they started the way, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia would mobilize and join them. The Arab national leaders were at least smart enough to say thanks but no thanks, in no small part because none of the other Arab leaders like or trust the Palestinians.
The only ones who joined the fight were Hezbollah, Iran, and the Houthis in Yemen. Iran is a thousand miles away from Israel, and the Houthis several hundred miles away, so they knew they wouldn’t get invaded by IDF troops, but they f(ooled) around and found out anyway. Hezbollah sort-of tried to intervene, albeit a bit half-heartedly, but found out themselves as well, as their eyes and fingers and balls left their bodies.
You don’t get into martyr heaven without your balls! No 72 bacha bazis for them!
And Donald Trump deserves a lot of credit as well. Had Kamala Emhoff been President [shudder!] she’d have been pressing Mr Netanyahu to ease off all along, but President Trump recognizes enemies of Western civilization in ways our past DEI Vice President never did, and while he wanted this deal, and potential past deals, he also let Israel know that the US would support them if they went all out to destroy Hamas.
Still, with the Arabs allowed to stay in Gaza, there is eventually little way I can see this working out in the long run. Had Israel done what they should have done in 1967, and expelled every last Arab from Judea, Samaria, and Gaza, giving the country shortened, more defensible borders, and not having a Arabs under the thumb of occupation, we would not have seen this mess today.