It was a foregone conclusion that Hamas would reject the Egyptian offer. It failed to address key concerns, not least that the suffocating siege be ended and that Israel honor earlier agreements, particularly on prisoners.
The ceasefire proposal was nothing more than a trap -- one whose purpose was to elicit a Hamas rejection and thereby provide Israel with a pretext to launch its ground invasion.
Netanyahu, backed by the US, is using the current attack to terrorize Gaza's civilian population, deplete Hamas' rocket stockpile, and then force it to accept terms of surrender.
The second investigation comes from journalist Raviv Drucker, this time concerning the peace talks that collapsed in April. Washington officials have told him that US negotiators spent the talks' key phase coordinating positions exclusively with Netanyahu. Abbas was then presented with a fait accompli of hardline Israeli demands.
Despite its public pronouncements, Washington was also secretly conspiring with Israel on a huge expansion of settlement projects. These were announced -- to loud condemnation by Kerry -- each time a batch of Palestinian prisoners was released, a condition Abbas had set for his participation.
But US opposition was feigned, writes Drucker. In reality, Washington was "informed of the [settlement] tenders in advance."
It is no surprise that Netanyahu has been acting in bad faith, and that his military campaigns in the West Bank and Gaza are designed to disrupt the recent reconciliation between Hamas and Abbas' Fatah.
As Israeli analyst Noam Sheizaf points out, Netanyahu is opposed to a peace deal of any kind. For him, "Mahmoud Abbas and Hamas are pretty much the same. Any gain by either one of them is a loss to Israel."
But of far greater concern should be the Obama
administration's decision to back Israel to the hilt and the US media's silence
on the matter. There can be no hope of a peaceful solution ever gaining traction
-- or these bouts of blood-letting in Gaza coming to end -- unless Washington is
finally unmasked as Israel's abettor-in-chief.
A version of this article first appeared in the National, Abu Dhabi.
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