President Joe Biden told reporters at the G7 summit in Italy that Hamas was responsible for blocking a proposed ceasefire and hostage deal that had the approval of the United Nations Security Council and the Israeli government.
The Jerusalem Post reported:
“The biggest hang-up so far is Hamas refusing to sign on even though they have submitted something similar,” Biden said, adding that it remained to be seen whether the deal would come to fruition.
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US Secretary of State Antony Blinken blamed [Gaza-based] Hamas leader Yayha Sinwar for the absence of a deal.
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There’s “one man who’s probably somewhere deep underground in Gaza for Hamas, Mr. Sinwar, who’s making all of these decisions. Well, he’s relatively safe underground. The people that he purports to represent, they’re suffering every day. So if he has their interests at heart, he will come to a conclusion to bring this to a conclusion[, Blinken said].”
National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan also blamed Hamas, while saying the U.S. would continue to push for a deal:
I do think Hamas’s assertion that they’ve accepted that proposal, to the extent that they are saying that publicly, is not correct. What they have done is responded to that proposal with an amended proposal. And as I said yesterday, some of those amendments are modest or minor. They’re not unanticipated. We can work through them. Others are not consistent with what President Biden laid out or what the U.N. Security Council embraced.
The Biden administration appears to have believed that if it proposed a deal “virtually identical” to one Hamas had proposed before, and framed it as being for the benefit of Palestinian civilians, that Hamas would accept the bargain.
However, the Biden negotiators appear not to have considered that Hamas’s sole concern is its own survival — and that Sinwar is not just prepared to sacrifice Palestinian civilians, but believes it is good for more of them to be killed.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, “The Zionist Conspiracy (and how to join it),” now available on Audible. He is also the author of the e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
