Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu holding a map of “The New Middle East” while addressing the UN General Assembly in New York last year.Credit: Noam Galai

Hamas rejected a cease-fire deal again!

The Israeli government standard-issue messages contained not a small note of glee last Saturday evening. Hamas had effectively rejected the latest temporary Gaza cease-fire-hostage release framework nicknamed for U.S. President Donald Trump’s special ops envoy, Steve Witkoff, at a convenient moment for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.

Hamas sent back proposals to improve the deal for its own purposes, but Witkoff described these as “unacceptable.” Netanyahu’s office issued a statement that evening: “While Israel has agreed to the updated Witkoff framework for the release of our hostages, Hamas persists in its refusal.”

Like all Israeli governments since 1948, this government, and Israelis in general, love to accuse Palestinians of rejectionism. Pro-Israel communities abroad, too, never miss an opportunity to insist that Palestinians “never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity,” as per the legendary Foreign Minister Abba Eban’s 1973 adage. It is in fact an apposite point, but this glove fits both hands – both historically, and in the current, accursed war.

Relatives and supporters of Israeli hostages demanding their release and an end to the war during a protest in Tel Aviv last week.Credit: Leo Correa/AP

Consider the cease-fire efforts at present. Hamas’ demands reportedly focused on getting guarantees by the United States that the cease-fire would become permanent. After all, this is the third iteration of the “Witkoff framework” by my count – the term turns out to be endlessly pliable – and each was supposed to advance a permanent end to the war in Gaza, at some pace or other.

The original cease-fire that the two sides agreed to in mid-January was incremental, conditional and set a timeframe for negotiating that permanent end to fighting. The second – the more incremental and far more limited version Witkoff proposed in late February and early March – was intended to stretch out the first phase of the first version. Israel liked the idea; Hamas demanded to stick to the first version.

Israel then unilaterally broke the original cease-fire in mid-March. Now, Witkoff’s new version proposes a painfully slow release of a limited number of hostages, a 60-day pause in the bloodletting, and the perplexing language that, during that period, “we can have at the proximity talks substantive negotiations in good-faith to try to reach a permanent ceasefire,” wrote Witkoff.

U.S. Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff visiting Hostage Square in Tel Aviv last month.Credit: Jack Guez/AFP

Sources close to the negotiations have confirmed the impression that between the first and the second cease-fire deal, just over one year apart, Hamas and Israel shared the blame for failing to get there fairly evenly. And it’s worth repeating that what Hamas should do is release all hostages unconditionally. Israel should also cease its war of destruction against Gaza. Unfortunately, neither of these things will happen.

The Israeli government’s insistence that Hamas is exclusively to blame for failing to reach a cease-fire is wrong, but Hamas has demonstrated its share of unconscionable, nihilistic rejection of cease-fire terms, no matter how inadequate – such as a two-month pause most likely to lead to resurgence of the war, in return for a partial hostage release that means more anguish for the families in Israel.

The other rejectionist

On Sunday this week, a group of Arab foreign ministers planned to visit Ramallah to meet with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

From left to right, Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty; Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan; Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi; Bahraini Foreign Minister Abdullatif bin Rashid Al Zayani; and Arab League Secretary-General Ahmed Aboul Gheit posing for a photo in Amman on Sunday.Credit: Raad Adayleh/AP

The meeting would have been a largely unprecedented visit of the foreign ministers of Jordan, Egypt, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia; it was an initiative of the Arab-Islamic Ministerial committee formed in 2024.

An Arab diplomat told me that the trip’s purpose at that particular time was “to try to make use of the current international momentum supporting the two-state solution and prior to the upcoming conference in New York,” referring to the ambitiously titled “International Conference for the Peaceful Settlement of the Palestinian Question and the Implementation of the Two-State Solution,” co-chaired by France and Saudi Arabia and scheduled for June 17-20.

But Israel decided not to allow the delegation to fly to the West Bank in a helicopter from Jordan. Sources familiar with the initiative told me the decision did not come from the army or its Coordinator for Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), but from the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office itself. Neither Netanyahu’s spokespeople nor the Israeli foreign ministry responded to requests for an explanation.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaking at a press conference in Jerusalem last month.Credit: Ronen Zvulun/AP

But the reason is clear enough. From the Israeli government’s perspective, the upcoming New York conference to advance Palestinian statehood and a two-state solution is just the latest irritation, a buzz in the background talking conflict resolution while Israel firmly rejects an end to the occupation or the wider conflict (beyond the current war), and rejects a Palestinian state absolutely.

The idea that Arab officials at the level of foreign ministers themselves would legitimize a figurehead of a future state – however decrepit and disliked Mahmoud Abbas might be among his own people – is anathema to the Israeli government, which doesn’t even want Abbas near a post-war, and presumably post-Hamas, Gaza.

The Ministerial Committee ended up holding their meeting in Amman; Abbas joined by Zoom. The biggest publicity win was a Facebook post by the Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, alongside a terse press release by the office of King Abdullah of Jordan, who attended the special session. It would have been an anti-climax, had anyone been paying attention in Israel or the world – but Israel’s rejection of even a distant whiff of Palestinian statehood is so common it’s not news.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas meeting virtually with the foreign ministers of Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Bahrain, as well as the Arab League’s Secretary-General, who met in Amman on Tuesday after the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office prevented the officials from meeting in Ramallah.Credit: Alaa Al Sukhni/Reuters

The incident is of a piece with the United States vetoing a cease-fire resolution at the UN Security Council on Wednesday. In practice, this means Israel can continue the slash, burn, land-grab military operation in Gaza while seeding yet another crop of new settlements in the West Bank, as UN member states prepare their working groups to prepare for the New York sessions to prepare for a two-state solution, which Israel’s government is quite aware it can continue to reject.

How the pro-Israel crowd avoids acknowledging this in-house rejectionism is unclear. A decade ago, Netanyahu literally campaigned on a promise that there would never be a Palestinian state on his watch, a policy he reiterates constantly, as does everyone else in his government. In response to exhausted diplomatic efforts to recognize a Palestinian state, the government has taken to making the repeated and bizarre threat of “unilateral actions” in response. It’s bizarre because Israel has taken unilateral actions to settle, control and ultimately annex Palestinian territories in practice for decades and daily.

Support or oppose a Palestinian state: No one can say with a straight face that there’s only one rejectionist in this conflict. It takes two to ruin life in this region, and the reign of terror driven by both parties to the current war in Gaza – Hamas and the Netanyahu government – won’t end until both are gone.

Dahlia Scheindlin