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Group of US rabbis urge Netanyahu to sign ceasefire deal
The 99 rabbis and cantors “urgently” called on the Israeli prime minister and all relevant parties to “finalise the deal on the table – outlined by President Biden and endorsed by Qatar, Egypt and the UN Security Council – and to bring much-needed relief to those suffering”, according to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
The rabbis said Jewish people in Israel and the global diaspora cannot start healing until the 115 captives held by Hamas in Gaza are returned home.
“Time is running out, and we must seize this opportunity to restore hope to the region,” the group said in a statement.
“Every day that the hostages are held in Gaza is a day that hope is diminished. It’s time to restore that hope to its full glory, reunite the hostages with their families and the entire Jewish people by sealing this deal,” they added.
Israeli politicians still not prepared to accept a negotiated truce in Gaza
Francis J Ricciardone, a former US ambassador to Egypt and Turkey, said the success of the upcoming Gaza ceasefire talks depends on whether Israeli politicians can agree on one path forward.
“It seems to me the core issue remains whether the Israeli government can unite behind a negotiated ceasefire,” Ricciardone told Al Jazeera from Washington, DC.
“We’ve seen again, recently, parts of the cabinet saying they will quit, and they will leave the government and the government will fall if Netanyahu accepts a negotiated ceasefire agreement before achieving all announced war aims,” he said.
These aims go beyond the control of the Philadelphi Corridor – the buffer zone between Egypt and Gaza, Ricciardone noted.
“They include the destruction of Hamas,” he said. “So it seems that we’re still very much stuck on whether the Israelis are prepared at this time, whether the Israeli government of Netanyahu is prepared this time to accept a negotiated ceasefire leading to an end of the war.”
And at the moment, it does not seem that way, he added.
Israel’s ultimate goal is sovereignty over all Palestinian land
Muhannad Ayyash, a policy analyst with the Palestinian think tank, Al Shabaka, criticised Israel’s approval of a new illegal settlement in Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank.
Ayyash said the plan – approved by Israel’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich – aims to break up Palestinian communities and prevent the creation of a Palestinian state.
“This is a part of the Israeli state’s strategy to fragment Palestinian communities from one another. So in effect, this is part of a larger strategy to isolate Bethlehem from the rest of the Palestinian territories and in fact, also further isolate East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank,” he said from Halifax in Canada.
“So, the strategic utility for Israel is always the same, whether it is in this site or another site. It’s always fragment the Palestinian population and critically, create what it calls facts on the ground […] in order to stop the creation of the Palestinian state,” he said.
Israel’s “ultimate goal”, he said was to “expand Israeli Jewish sovereignty over the entirety of the land, from the river to the sea”.
