US envoy Witkoff says Washington thinks Gaza war ‘to settle’ by end of year
Speaking to Fox News yesterday, Trump’s Middle East envoy predicted the Gaza war would wrap up “one way or another, certainly before the end of this year”.
That’s a more cautious forecast than Trump’s own claim a day earlier that he believed the conflict would be over within three weeks.
More people are dying every day from starvation, how many more have to die in 4 months. Witkoff is just enabling Israel's Gaza occupation and ethnic cleansing plan while continuing to starve everyone in Gaza.
Mediators perplexed by Netanyahu’s non-response to ceasefire proposal: Israeli opposition leader
Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid says he has conversed with “the highest-level mediators” in ceasefire negotiations as they seek insight on why Israel’s government has yet to respond to the latest proposal.
“In recent days I spoke with the highest-level mediators in the negotiations, and they told me, ‘We don’t understand what happened – Hamas accepted the conditions Netanyahu set’,” said Lapid in comments carried by Israel’s Army Radio.
“They called to ask me if I know why he hasn’t gotten back to them,” he added.
US appears ‘less and less interested in quick Gaza war resolution’
Abdullah Al-Arian, associate professor of history at Georgetown University in Qatar, says he is doubtful a White House meeting on the future of Gaza scheduled for today will prove fruitful.
“There’s not much to it, I think,” Al-Arian told Al Jazeera. “Everything we’ve seen up to this point is the fact that the US seems to be less and less interested in any type of resolution [to the war] any time soon.”
Al-Arian said it is “dangerous to assume” that the US and Israel are continuing ceasefire negotiations “in good faith when we know that ultimately Israel is quite clear about its intentions”.
“Israel has been clear about those intentions really from the very start and has very vocally been expressing them in a way that has not gotten any pushback from its biggest ally in the US,” he continued.
“We have to get to a point where we see these efforts at negotiation, mediation as being in some way an extension of the genocide,” Al-Arian said.
Israel’s refusal to discuss Gaza ceasefire deal shows ‘massive despair’
Ori Goldberg, an Israeli political commentator, says “the fact that the Israeli government is refusing to discuss the ceasefire deal [approved by Hamas, according to mediators] definitely shows that Israel feels it has no option but to accept it”.
“And in order not to accept it, it simply doesn’t bring it up on the agenda,” he said. “Israel is showing massive despair. Nothing says they are not in control of our own reality as a complete rejection of it.”
Goldberg said, “Netanyahu’s political survival, in many ways, depends on his ability to drive out of the Gaza Strip and out of the West Bank as many Palestinians as possible, as well as to continue killing Palestinians on the regular basis.”
