GAZA/TEL AVIV, Nov 22 (Reuters) - Israel’s government and Hamas agreed on Wednesday to a four-day pause in fighting to allow the release of 50 hostages held in Gaza in exchange for 150 Palestinians imprisoned in Israel, and the entry of humanitarian aid into the besieged enclave.

  • Andy
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    1 year ago

    This is such good news. Now the challenge is to keep both sides from reigniting.

    I don’t really know what Hamas and Haniyeh and Sinwar want, so it’s hard to speculate what they’ll do, but I know that Netanyahu is trying to reignite the war as hard as he can, and will be desperate to see the ceasefire ended prematurely under circumstances he can blame on Hamas.

    For those who haven’t followed his career (and his actions in the least week in particular) this seems abundantly clear. The absolute worst thing that could happen to him would be a deescalation that leads to an political negotiations. I really hope the US antiwar movement is prepared to increase their pressure, because I believe it’s made the difference in getting us this far. As furious as I’ve been at Biden’s response, I have read multiple reports that the US was far more involved in hostage negotiations than Israel, so I will give Biden this sliver of credit if people actually come home. But he really needs to stop propping up Bibi if he wants to land this plane for real.

    • hydro033
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      241 year ago

      I don’t really know what Hamas and Haniyeh and Sinwar want

      Are you serious? They want the complete destruction of Israel. Have you never read anything Hamas has put out?

      • PugJesus
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        121 year ago

        I think they might mean “want in an immediate sense”. Even Hamas isn’t deluded enough to think that they’re capable of destroying Israel at this moment.

        • Alto
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          71 year ago

          No, but they knew exactly what the Israeli reaction would be, and that said reaction would end up providing a wave of freshly minted fighters.

          • PugJesus
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            61 year ago

            Yeah, but I mean, what is their goal now? Like, in the next few months kind of immediate, the kind of immediate that would cause them to accept a truce? Freshly minted fighters don’t mean much if Israel gets away with ethnic cleansing, after all.

            • @Mrkawfee@lemmy.world
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              61 year ago

              Goal now is to get Israel to withdraw and use hostages to extract concessions including the release of kidnapped Palestinians in Israeli jails and humanitarian aid for beleaguered civilians. The military hostages are probably the highest value from a negotiation standpoint and will be kept the longest.

            • @samokosik@lemmynsfw.com
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              1 year ago

              I would bet the fights will continue after. Also, Israel has not done ethnic cleansing in Gaza.

              Edit: Though I agree that in certain cases (e.g. 1948), they didn’t deal either with the situation well

      • Alto
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        71 year ago

        There’s a handful of people that really don’t want to acknowledge that

        • @jaybone@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          And these 150 prisoners are Hamas terrorists that will be exchanged for 50 innocent civilians.

          So hamas will have more terrorists on their side to fan the flames for Netinyahu’s next response.

          • @neeshie@lemmy.world
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            41 year ago

            They’re Palestinian women and children, not terrorists. It’s a trade of innocents for innocents

            • @LaLiLuLuCo@lemmy.ca
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              1 year ago

              13 women mostly convicted of stabbings.

              Edit: 33 women are on the list of 300 total, I counted the Hebrew source material myself. 15+ is of those with stabbing charges and convictions or general attempted murder.

              Overwhelming majority of minors did fucked up shit.

              https://www.gov.il/he/Departments/DynamicCollectors/is-db?skip=0

              https://www.timesofisrael.com/palestinian-just-convicted-of-stabbing-her-neighbor-may-be-freed-in-hamas-deal/

                • @LaLiLuLuCo@lemmy.ca
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                  1 year ago

                  OK, terrorist. Attempting murder is bad.

                  They picked this set because Hamas asked for this set. The actual convicted murders weren’t allowed to be released.

                  There’s no hostages in Israel, there’s people being processed by the courts. If you think the wait times are bad go check out Japan and claim they have hostages, or the US prison system with constitutional slave labor and barely any public defenders with the largest per capita prison pop in the world.

                  There’s something like 50 women total held.

                  All of these people get charged there’s a reason almost no one on the list is there for more than 2 years without being tried in civil court. The military tribunal cases convert over when they get processed. They were charged and their charges are listed in the database.

            • @jaybone@lemmy.world
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              -31 year ago

              They are terrorists.

              Israel didn’t kidnap them for no reason. Unlike what Hamas does.

              Go vote for Trump and believe in fake news.

              • @neeshie@lemmy.world
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                11 year ago

                The over a thousand people held without charges would disagree with you. Are trusted human rights organizations fake news now?

        • @steventhedev@lemmy.world
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          211 year ago

          Do you mean this part:

          1. Hamas believes that no part of the land of Palestine shall be compromised or conceded, irrespective of the causes, the circumstances and the pressures and no matter how long the occupation lasts. Hamas rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea.

          Or perhaps this part:

          1. Resisting the occupation with all means and methods is a legitimate right guaranteed by divine laws and by international norms and laws. At the heart of these lies armed resistance, which is regarded as the strategic choice for protecting the principles and the rights of the Palestinian people.

          Oh wait, there’s more:

          1. A real state of Palestine is a state that has been liberated. There is no alternative to a fully sovereign Palestinian State on the entire national Palestinian soil, with Jerusalem as its capital.

          They define “Palestinian soil” earlier:

          1. Palestine, which extends from the River Jordan in the east to the Mediterranean in the west and from Ras Al-Naqurah in the north to Umm Al-Rashrash in the south, is an integral territorial unit. It is the land and the home of the Palestinian people. The expulsion and banishment of the Palestinian people from their land and the establishment of the Zionist entity therein do not annul the right of the Palestinian people to their entire land and do not entrench any rights therein for the usurping Zionist entity.

          They have only 1 segment that even hints that they might accept a 2 state solution:

          However, without compromising its rejection of the Zionist entity and without relinquishing any Palestinian rights, Hamas considers the establishment of a fully sovereign and independent Palestinian state, with Jerusalem as its capital along the lines of the 4th of June 1967, with the return of the refugees and the displaced to their homes from which they were expelled, to be a formula of national consensus.

          Which is pretty hard to take at face as an acceptance of a two state solution when it literally says in the sentence before that that they reject any alternative other than “from the river to the sea” and in the sentence after completely reject the Oslo accords.

        • @Mrkawfee@lemmy.world
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          -21 year ago

          Yes Israel paints them as Nazi Isis but it’s more accurate to view them as the Viet Cong. They are fighting an anti colonial war.

      • Andy
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        1 year ago

        This is so dumb and reductive, though.

        First, that goal is like trying to drink the ocean. It’s obviously impossible, so it’s not useful as an indicator for what they’ll agree to.

        Second, we hear this over and over, but the only citation is their founding document over thirty years ago. And in 2006 they went through a moderate rebrand, and then a lot of people in the org died, and Sinwar spent two decades in Israeli prison, so… that doesn’t really tell us where they’re at in this moment.

        Folks act like they’re orcs. Just mindlessly evil. They’re definitely completely ruthless, but the stuff they do isn’t that different from what the IRA did, and they still made peace. So what does Sinwar want? Has anyone thought to ask?

    • @randon31415@lemmy.world
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      121 year ago

      Netanyahu: “We have creditable evidence that Hamas is experimenting with atomic weaponry. If nothing is done within 300 years, Hamas will have nukes!”

    • Hatsune Miku
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      31 year ago

      This is such good news. Now the challenge is to keep both sides from reigniting.

      There was a ceasefire already in place prior to the 7th of October attacks

        • @samokosik@lemmynsfw.com
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          11 year ago

          Not necessarily. There were needed controls from Israeli side to ensure as little weapons get there as possible. That’s not blockade. That’s an attempt to prevent a terrorist organization to gain way too much power.

          • @rambaroo@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Israel was blockading fucking food ports into Palestine. I’m sick of people trying to justify this extremist bullshit by painting every Palestinian as a terrorist. Yes it was a damn blockade. Stop fucking lying about it.

            And the only reason Israel started the blockade was Hamas getting elected, which Israel helped them to do in the first place.

            • @samokosik@lemmynsfw.com
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              11 year ago

              Not every palestinian is terrorist, I agree. So now let’s divide people into 2 categories: West bank inhabitants and Gaza inhabitants.

              Hamas in Gaza made the population so radical that both egypt and israel decided to close the borders. They (at least Egypt) would not do it if the population was not so radical.

              In the West Bank, people are less radical but still it’s not ideal.

          • Andy
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            21 year ago

            You know, instead of relitigating the crimes of both sides until we die, what if we just organize a new peace process already?

            It’s been a fucking generation since anyone actually tried. And people always say, “Oh, ___ wont’ agree to that!” Well, okay, prove it. Book the big room at Olive Garden and see if someone shows up.

            • @samokosik@lemmynsfw.com
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              11 year ago

              Obviously, it would be absolutely awesome to have a peace but firstly we need all the sides to agree on that. With Hamas present, neither Israelis/Palestinians will accept a deal.

              • Andy
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                11 year ago

                Both sides make that claim, and neither is going to sit down as long as they have a choice not to.

                Apartheid ended because the rest of the world left the people enforcing it with no means of retaining power. The same must be applied to Israel-Palestine.

      • NoneOfUrBusiness
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        71 year ago

        A ceasefire that doesn’t involve lifting the blockade is meaningless because the blockade is already an act of war.

        • @cuibono@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          They also assassinated their journalist Shireen Abu Akleh last year so idk what type of ceasefire it is when only one side gets to murder the others (but they didn’t drop any bombs so it’s ok).

      • Andy
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        11 year ago

        What’s your point? I don’t see how this relates to either my statement that it is good news that hostages are being released or my statement that it will be a challenge to keep both sides from reigniting.

    • @naturalgasbad@lemmy.ca
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      31 year ago

      The concept of evaluating media for bias and conflating that with factuality is, frankly, terrifying. A site’s political views is not necessarily representative of its factuality, but Media Bias Fact Check consistently penalizes sites that have “never failed a fact check” because they are not considered to be “least biased.”

      These sites bite off more than they can chew. They’re extremely US-Western-centric (mostly because the authors of these sites tend to be American and thus have their own set of American biases) - claiming that America is somehow the paragon of journalistic freedoms and free speech is, in itself, an American bias. CBC, which hasn’t failed a fact check, is only a “high” on the factual reporting scale, for example. Meanwhile Reuters, for which I can point to multiple instances where they got key details wrong, gets a “very high” for factual reporting.

  • Annoyed_🦀 A
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    171 year ago

    Dang, finally, 50 is still small amount but hopefully this lead to more. More importantly is the flow of humanitarian aid

    Israeli media said the first release of hostages was expected on Thursday. Implementing the deal must wait for 24 hours to give Israeli citizens the chance to ask the Supreme Court to block the release of Palestinian prisoners, reports said.

    Wouldn’t that break the truce??

      • @Tavarin@lemmy.ca
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        61 year ago

        Israel could have made Gaza a parking lot well before any hostages were taken if that’s what they wanted to do.

        • NoneOfUrBusiness
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          01 year ago

          It seems that’s the plan right now. They’re making it a parking lot as fast as the international community (well mostly the US) will tolerate.

          • @Tavarin@lemmy.ca
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            11 year ago

            So extremely slowly? Gaza’s population has doubled in the last 17 years since Israel’s withdrawal.

            If they wanted a parking lot they could have had it.

            • NoneOfUrBusiness
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              21 year ago

              Nobody said Israel wants to kill all Gazans. However, by their own admission, they want to forcibly relocate them (which is ethnic cleansing and depending on who you ask genocide) for Lebensraum.

              • @Tavarin@lemmy.ca
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                1 year ago

                Just as the Gazans want to forcibly relocate the Israelis, most of whom were born there, and a large percentage have families that have been there for hundreds of years.

                Both sides want to ethnically cleanse the other, yet idiots on this site seem to love to support Palestine only, and ignore their own attempts at genocide.

  • AutoTL;DRB
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    -31 year ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    Ahead of the announcement of the deal, Netanyahu said the intervention of U.S. President Joe Biden had helped to improve the tentative agreement so that it included more hostages and fewer concessions.

    In addition to Israeli citizens, more than half the hostages held foreign and dual citizenship from some 40 countries including the U.S., Thailand, Britain, France, Argentina, Germany, Chile, Spain and Portugal, Israel’s government has said.

    Implementing the deal must wait for 24 hours to give Israeli citizens the chance to ask the Supreme Court to block the release of Palestinian prisoners, reports said.

    Qatar’s chief negotiator in ceasefire talks, Minister of State at the Foreign Ministry Mohammed Al-Khulaifi, told Reuters that the International Committee of the Red Cross would be working inside Gaza to facilitate the hostages’ release.

    The armed wing of the Palestinian militant group Islamic Jihad, which participated in the Oct. 7 raid with Hamas, said late on Tuesday that one of the Israeli hostages it has held since the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel had died.

    “We previously expressed our willingness to release her for humanitarian reasons, but the enemy was stalling and this led to her death,” Al Quds Brigades said on its Telegram channel.


    The original article contains 980 words, the summary contains 201 words. Saved 79%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

    • @DolphinMath@slrpnk.netOP
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      1 year ago

      I think this bot is broken. This isn’t the article linked.

      Edit: On second look this is the article, just a terrible summary missing pretty much everything important.

      • Andy
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        11 year ago

        Worked for me. Try again maybe?

        • @DolphinMath@slrpnk.netOP
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          1 year ago

          Edit: On second look, this is the article, just a very poor “summary” for whatever reason.

          Original response:

          Sorry, I’m confused. Here’s the first 5 paragraphs in the linked article. I’m not seeing any of it summarized by the bot.

          Israel’s government and Hamas agreed on Wednesday to a four-day pause in fighting to allow the release of 50 hostages held in Gaza in exchange for 150 Palestinians imprisoned in Israel, and the entry of humanitarian aid into the besieged enclave.

          Officials from Qatar, which has been mediating secret negotiations, as well as the U.S., Israel and Hamas have for days been saying a deal was imminent.

          Hamas is believed to be holding more than 200 hostages, taken when its fighters surged into Israel on Oct. 7, killing 1,200 people, according to Israeli tallies.

          A statement by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said 50 women and children will be released over four days, during which there will be a pause in fighting.

          For every additional 10 hostages released, the pause would be extended by another day, it said, without mentioning the release of Palestinian prisoners in exchange.