Israel's Qatar Bombing Is The Latest In A Long History Of Sabotaging Ceasefires.

Continuing it's longstanding tradition of sabotaging ceasefires, Israel now bombs another country to sabotage a ceasefire.

Israel, with the backing of the Trump administration, has targeted Hamas negotiators in Qatar in order to sabotage a potential ceasefire deal in Gaza.

Writing about the Qatar strike, journalist Qassam Muaddi in Mondoweiss notes, “Israeli media said that the strike targeted the office of the lead Hamas negotiator in the ongoing ceasefire talks, Khalil al-Hayya, in addition to other members of the negotiating team”.

For context, as Mauddi explains:

The Israeli strike occurred as the Hamas negotiating team met to discuss the latest ceasefire proposal presented by U.S. President Donald Trump

The Israeli attack comes after Trump had put forward a proposal for a 60-day ceasefire that would see the release of all Israeli captives in the first 48 hours of the agreement. In exchange, negotiations to permanently end the war on Gaza would commence, with personal guarantees from the U.S. President that Israel would engage in the negotiations “in good faith.”

Indeed as Journalist Aaron Mate noted :

As Hamas officials gathered to discuss Trump’s ultimatum, 10 Israeli warplanes entered Qatari airspace and bombed them. Six people were reportedly killed; Hamas claims that its senior leadership survived.

As they did with Iran back in June, Trump and his ally Benjamin Netanyahu had used the cover of negotiations for an act of aggression that sabotaged a potential agreement.

This is far from the first time Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel have intentionally sabotaged a ceasefire agreement with Palestinians.

Indeed, it is just the latest chapter in a decades-long history of Israel intentionally sabotaging any and all potential peace agreements with Palestinians.

Blocking A State Of Palestine.

As Muhammad Shehada, a Palestinian writer and analyst from Gaza and the EU Affairs Manager at Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, notes, “For more than half a century, the greatest obstacle to Middle East peace has not been the absence of bold Palestinian overtures, but the relentless Israeli determination to bury them before they can take root”.

As Shehada writes, “In 1976, the PLO and Arab countries pushed for a resolution at the UN Security Council that called for the two-state solution. The resolution received support from all UNSC members, but Israel rejected it, so the US vetoed it.”

Similarly as he documented, “In 1988, the Palestine Liberation Organisation gave Israel the most generous offer in Palestinian history” which “accepted the state of Israel, conceded 78% of historic Palestine to ‘a Jewish State,’ and condemned ‘terrorism in all its forms’ and asked in return for a state in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem.”

In response, Shehada notes, “Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir immediately rejected the PLO’s gesture, deeming it ‘crazy and dangerous’ and vowing that Israel ‘will never permit the creation of an independent Palestinian state in the occupied territories’” and “his Defence Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, pledged to use ‘an iron fist’ to crush this peace offering”.

In leaked audio, Benjamin Netanyahu brags about sabotaging the Oslo peace accords during his first term from 1996 to 1999.

In a leaked video, when Benjamin Netanyahu was speaking to West Bank settlers, he bragged, “how he conditioned his signing of the 1997 Hebron agreement on American consent that there be no withdrawals from ‘specified military locations,’ and insisted he choose those same locations, such as the whole of the Jordan Valley, for example”.

Netanyahu stated, “Why is that important? Because from that moment on, I stopped the Oslo Accords”.

As Israeli journalist Gideon Levy noted at the time, “No more claims that the Palestinians are to blame for the failure of the Oslo Accords. Netanyahu exposed the naked truth to his hosts at Ofra: he destroyed the Oslo accords with his own hands and deeds, and he's even proud of it. After years in which we were told that the Palestinians are to blame, the truth has emerged from the horse's mouth”.

The following year, at the Camp David negotiations in 2000, as Muhammad Shehada notes, “Israel made clear at Camp David that the maximum it would offer Palestinians was not a sovereign independent state, but rather three discontiguous Bantustans separated by Israeli settlements and military checkpoints without any right of return for Palestinian refugees”.

The “deal” offered by Israel included that, “Israel would retain control over Palestine’s airspace, radio, cellphone coverage, and borders with Jordan, and maintain its military bases in 13.3% of the West Bank while annexing 9% and even keeping three settlement blocks in Gaza that cut the enclave into separate pieces”.

As Israel's negotiator at the Camp David negotiations, Shlomo Ben Ami even admitted, “If I were a Palestinian, I Would Have Rejected Camp David”.

Moving to 2002, all 22 member states of the Arab League agreed to full normalization with Israel, if it in return, Israel agreed to “a full Israeli withdrawal from all the territories occupied since 1967”, “achievement of a just solution to the Palestinian refugee problem” and agreed to “the acceptance of the establishment of a sovereign independent Palestinian state on the Palestinian territories occupied since June 4, 1967 in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with East Jerusalem as its capital”.

Similarly, Israel did everything it could to sabotage this agreement.

When Israel officially withdrew settlements from Gaza in 2005, Israeli advisor Dov Weisglass boasted that, “the disengagement (from Gaza) is actually formaldehyde. It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary, so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians” saying, “you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders, and Jerusalem”.

This was followed by a brutal blockade placed on Gaza by Israel, which Dov Weisglass bragged was intended to “put the Palestinians on a diet”.

Similarly, Israel sabotaged multiple negotiations to end the blockade.

As the American intelligence contractor “Stratfor” noted , :

While Israel has agreed to engage in negotiations with the Palestinians, it seeks to force the failure of these negotiations by making unrealistic demands and then blame that failure on the Palestinians' unwillingness to meet those demands. This tactic - demonstrated by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's insistence on direct talks without preconditions - enables Israel to appease U.S. and international pressure (to loosen the blockade) while showing the world that Israel's attempts at peace are being sabotaged by Palestinian intransigence. Israel also hopes that by engaging in negotiations, it can further damage intra-Palestinian relations as the competing Palestinian groups criticize each other's policies toward Israel while continuing to vie for international funding and domestic popularity. By engineering the failure of any negotiation attempt, Israel hopes to be able to reassume the position (full blockade on Gaza) it abandoned due to U.S. pressure.

Benjamin Netanyahu himself recently bragged to a group of West Bank settlers that over the last 25 years, “we would do everything to ensure our continued hold on the Land of Israel, to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, to thwart the attempts that existed then — and unfortunately still exist — to try to uproot us from here.”

He went on to brag, “Pressures from home, pressures from abroad, a series of American presidents who wanted to uproot us and to establish a Palestinian state here. We stood firm together. We upheld the promise of the generations”.

Repeatedly Rejecting Gaza Ceasefires.

Since the start of the Genocide in Gaza, Israel has repeatedly rejected ceasefire offers from Hamas.

Starting from day one of the genocide, the former Israeli hostage envoy, Haim Rubinstein, revealed that, “We later found out that Hamas had offered on October 9 or 10 to release all the civilian hostages in exchange for the IDF not entering the Strip, but the government rejected the offer”.

While the Biden administration blamed Hamas for the failure of ceasefire talks while in power, multiple Biden administration officials later admitted on Israeli TV that Israel was the one sabotaging the talks.

As the Times of Israel noted, former U.S. ambassador to Israel, Jack Lew, “pointed to the premier’s (Netanyahu) decision in August 2024 to launch a public campaign regarding the importance of Israel remaining in the Philadelphi Corridor border stretch between Egypt and Gaza, which Washington felt was disingenuous and designed to tank the negotiations at a critical point”.

Lew admitted, “We were very close to having an agreement with Egypt on something that’s almost identical to what was in the final phase two agreement, and that was achievable at that moment. I think there were domestic political reasons [for Netanyahu] to be seen as taking a very hard line on the Philadelphi Corridor”.

Ilan Goldenberg, a former senior national security advisor for the Biden administration, admitted, “I would get a lot of whispers from old Israeli friends [who said] all the security people are coming out and saying [Netanyahu’s] undercutting it (the ceasefire deal) every step of the way. I start to believe [it] when there’s so much coming out [saying] that he’s clearly a problem. Whereas some of my colleagues didn’t quite see it”.

Dan Shapiro, the Biden administration’s deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East, also admitted that Israel refused to normalize relations with Saudi Arabia because “the Palestinian component of the normalization deal proved to be too much for Israel to accept”.

Shapiro admitted, “the Israeli government depended on far-right ministers who would try to block that Israeli commitment to allow a pathway to a Palestinian state”.

When Netanyahu was temporarily forced to take a ceasefire deal in January of this year, multiple inside Israeli sources told Haaretz that the ceasefire deal was working, but Netanyahu intentionally sabotaged it.

One source said, ‘Netanyahu is signaling quite clearly that he doesn't want to move to the next phase. He's sending a team without a mandate and without the ability to do anything. Right-wing voters see that we haven't defeated Hamas, and its operatives are still roaming with weapons. The signs on stages in Gaza during the hostage return events mock Netanyahu and reference his 'total victory' slogan, Netanyahu knows he doesn't have a government if he proceeds with the deal”.

Another source said, “The process is working, hostages are being released, but Hamas is doing this with the expectation of a second stage, leading to a [full] cease-fire and Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. Once Hamas realizes there won't be a second stage, they may not complete the first, Hamas isn't stupid. They see the politicization of the negotiations, the appointment of Netanyahu loyalists Ron Dermer and Gal Hirsch, and the statements from Smotrich and other right-wing ministers threatening to topple the government. They'll understand where this is headed.”.

In April of this year, the Times of Israel reported that Hamas offered to “enter a long-term truce with Israel during which it would halt all military operations, including the development of weapons and the digging of tunnels”, “cede governing control of Gaza to an independent body of Palestinian technocrats” and to “have all of the group’s weapons placed in a guarded warehouse” but “Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated his opposition to such a deal, asserting that Israel would not agree to end the war and withdraw from Gaza, even if that meant securing the release of all remaining 59 hostages”.

In May of this year, journalist Jeremy Scahill reported that Trump’s Middle East envoy Steven Witkoff told Hamas that if they released “U.S. citizen and Israeli soldier Edan Alexander, the Trump administration would compel Israel to lift the Gaza blockade and allow humanitarian aid to enter the territory” and “Trump would make a public call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and for negotiations aimed at achieving a ‘permanent ceasefire’” but Witkoff abandoned the deal after Hamas held up its end of the bargain and released Alexander.

Last month, as the Times of Israel reported Hamas, “accepted the ceasefire-hostage release deal proposal that was submitted to the group a day earlier, which sources said involves a 60-day pause and the release of 10 living captives” while Netanyahu, “dismissed the Hamas response and signaled that Israel was moving forward with its plan to take over the Palestinian enclave’s largest city (Gaza city) and transfer its population to the southern Strip”.

Now, Israel yet again sabotages ceasefire talks by bombing negotiators in Qatar in order to continue its genocide and ethnic cleansing plan of Gaza.

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