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Title: Trump 'Forced Netanyahu to Accept a Gaza Plan He Repeatedly Rejected' - Israeli Media
Source:
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URL Source: https://www.informationliberation.com/?id=64807
Published: Jan 14, 2025
Author: Chris Menahan
Post Date: 2025-01-14 08:00:23 by Horse
Keywords: None
Views: 18
President-elect Donald Trump reportedly "forced" Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to accept a peace deal that will end the Jewish state's war on Gaza and leave Hamas in power. From Haaretz, "Trump's Mideast Envoy Forced Netanyahu to Accept a Gaza Plan He Repeatedly Rejected": Last Friday evening, Steven Witkoff, U.S. President-elect Donald Trump's Middle East envoy, called from Qatar to tell Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's aides that he would be coming to Israel the following afternoon. The aides politely explained that was in the middle of the Sabbath but that the prime minister would gladly meet him Saturday night. Witkoff's blunt reaction took them by surprise. He explained to them in salty English that Shabbat was of no interest to him. His message was loud and clear. Thus in an unusual departure from official practice, the prime minister showed up at his office for an official meeting with Witkoff, who then returned to Qatar to seal the deal. A week before Trump's inauguration, Jerusalem already sees a change in the rules of the game that has broken the deadlock in the hostage negotiations. Unusually, the outgoing Biden administration has let Witkoff lead the process, on the grounds that any obligations the United States undertakes will be incumbent on Trump, not on Biden. Witkoff is a Jewish real estate investor and developer who is close to Trump. He doesn't have the background of the kind of people who usually fill diplomatic roles. "Witkoff isn't a diplomat. He doesn't talk like a diplomat, he has no interest in diplomatic manners and diplomatic protocols," says a senior Israeli diplomat who spoke on condition of anonymity. "He's a businessman who wants to reach a deal quickly and charges ahead unusually aggressively." In fact, Witkoff has forced Israel to accept a plan that Netanyahu had repeatedly rejected over the past half year. Hamas has not budged from its position that the hostages' freedom must be conditioned on the release of Palestinian prisoners (the easy part) and a complete Israeli withdrawal from Gaza (the hard one). Netanyahu rejected this condition and thus was born the partial deal proposed by Egypt. I assumed last week that Trump had shared that video of Jeffrey Sachs calling Netanyahu a "deep, dark son of a bitch" inadvertently but it's looking like that was actually a shot across the bow. 
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