1. The deal agreed to tonight has been on the table since the end of May. We the people (of Israel and Palestine) need to hold accountable those who are directly responsible for delaying the deal until Donald Trump came along and said “make it happen”. How cynical can our leaders be? Utterly disgraceful.
2. It is a bad deal because if doesn’t bring home all of the hostages immediately. It is a bad deal because it will take at least 12 weeks and probably more to implement it. It is a bad deal because it lacks the entire political side of determining who is going to rule Gaza when the war is over. It is a bad deal because it does not explicitly determine that the war will end and that Israel will withdraw from Gaza.
3. It is a bad deal because there was an alternative which was much better. In September 2024, I received in writing from Hamas that they agreed to the “Three Weeks Deal” – to release all of the hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners, to end the war including a full withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza, and Hamas would turn over the governance of Gaza to a civilian professional non-Hamas Palestinian government.
4. I blame Hamas for not publishing the “Three Weeks Deal” that they agreed to. I blame Netanyahu and the Israeli negotiators for not verifying with Qatar and Egypt that Hamas agreed to the “Three Weeks Deal”. I blame President Biden and his emissary Bret McGurk for not budging from the bad “three months deal” that has been agreed to tonight.
5. I congratulate President Trump for making this happen and his emissary Steve Witkoff for knowing how to make a deal and staying at it until it gets done.
6. This deal done tonight; I believe will lead to the end of the war. I don’t believe that Hamas would have agreed to it without receiving promises from Qatar and Egypt that the war would in fact end. I believe that Egypt and Qatar received promises from Trump that he would ensure that the war would end with this deal. All of the hostages should eventually come home, but we must be ready for the possibility that some hostages may be buried underneath the rubble of buildings that Israel bombed, along with thousands of missing Gazans. Many Palestinian prisoners will be released, not all of them to their homes. I hope that they never return to violence. I hope that Israel never arrests them again.
7. When the deal is done and fully implemented, we Israelis must force Israel to go to new elections. We must insist on a National Commission of Inquiry and we must hold Netanyahu and his government responsible. The Palestinian people should hold Hamas responsible for the disaster that Hamas brought on the Palestinian people and on Gaza. War crimes have been committed on both sides of this conflict and we the people of Israel and Palestine are living the hell of trauma as a result of the longest war in our history. From this trauma we must all come to the conclusion that there is no military solution to this conflict and there never has been one. There is no viable armed struggle to liberate Palestine and there never has been one. There are seven million Israeli Jews and seven million Palestinian Arabs living on the land between the River and the Sea, both peoples are here and both peoples are staying. Both peoples must have the right to self-determination, to security, to freedom, to security and to dignity. This really has to be the last Israeli-Palestinian war. We cannot continue to do this to each other.
