> Muhammad Shehada Hamas Has No More Cards to Play NETANYAHU COMES THROUGH AGAIN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

After five months of daunting negotiations with President Trump’s Board of Peace, Hamas agreed last month to a road map under which it and other armed Palestinian groups would decommission their heavy weapons and give up security control in Gaza. Hamas also agreed to step down from governing Gaza and accept the deployment of an international stabilization force. In return, Israel would halt airstrikes, withdraw its troops from Gaza and allow the devastated enclave to be rebuilt.

Hamas’s agreement represented a fragile opportunity to break out of an otherwise intractable deadlock. The rejection of the plan by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel on Sunday is a setback for Israelis who want peace and security, and for Palestinians in Gaza who want relief from the cruel and painful conditions imposed by Israel. It is the latest example of Israel’s inability to say yes.

There is a narrow window to pressure Israel to change its mind and lock in Hamas’s compromise. Once Hamas’s disarming and Israel’s withdrawal took place, it would become impossible for Hamas to renege. The world would blame it for giving Mr. Netanyahu a pretext to collapse the deal and resume Israel’s military campaign.

In rejecting the peace plan, Mr. Netanyahu said Israel would not begin to withdraw until the Palestinian groups completed their disarmament. But Hamas is unlikely to accept that. It believes it would lose all leverage in the negotiations, and may have difficulty convincing its entire rank-and-file membership to disarm immediately, instead of in phases, without something in return.

One sign Hamas might be serious about giving up its weapons is that, aside from an alleged incident of a sole projectile being fired and landing inside Gaza itself, it and other armed groups have apparently not fired a rocket at Israel since the original cease-fire took effect in October. They have shown this restraint despite the fact that Israel has killed over 1,000 Palestinians in Gaza in that time, including Hamas’s top military leaders.

This unusual holding back could very well indicate that Hamas has no better cards left to play. Armed resistance in Gaza has reached its limit and has exhausted the rationales that sustained it. Well before the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas’s deputy leader, Saleh al-Arouri, admitted as much in 2020, according to a leaked phone conversation. “Frankly, armed resistance failed to create change,” he said. “The resistance presented heroic examples and fought honorable wars, but the blockade wasn’t broken, the political reality didn’t change and none of the land was liberated.”