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| Israel-Palestine-Jordan |
| Hamas drops upfront ceasefire demand, Israel sends team to negotiations |
| 2024-07-04 |
| [JPost] Uh huh. 48 Hamas has dropped its demand for an upfront pledge that Israel ends the war, a move that prompted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to send a team led by Mossad Director David Barnea to participate in further negotiations for a deal, The Jerusalem Post has learned. The terror group is still expected to demand a permanent ceasefire, possibly even before the completion of phase one, but would allow that first phase of the three-phase deal — that would see the release of the remaining 120 hostages — to get underway without such a pledge. It’s a key shift in the group’s position that has sparked cautious hope that the deadlock that greeted the proposal US President Joe Biden unveiled on May 31, may now finally have been broken, allowing for closure of the deal, or at least its first phase. Multiple top defense officials call the new pending negotiations the closest Israel has been to achieving a hostage deal with Hamas, since the November agreement which saw the release of 105 of the 251 hostages seized during the Hamas-led invasion of Israel on October 7, 2023. |
| Posted by:Frank G |