Are 120 hostages, at least some of whom are already dead, really worth Israel playing pattycake with the psychopaths in Hamas? From The Wall Street Journal:

Emboldened Gazans Express Anger at Hamas, Israel Over Cease-Fire Talks Impasse

Failure of repeated cycles of negotiations is frustrating those who have most to gain from an end to the war

By Fatima AbdulKarim, Dov Lieber, and Abeer Ayyoub | Thursday, June 13, 2024 | 1:08 PM EDT

Gaza’s war-weary population is growing increasingly frustrated with the fruitless cycles of cease-fire talks, as a new poll of Palestinians shows support for Hamas dwindling in the enclave.

Months of diplomacy between Israel, Hamas and mediators from the U.S., Egypt and Qatar have failed to produce agreement even on the outline of a deal that would stop the fighting and free Israeli hostages in Gaza.

The back and forth, as the death toll from the war mounts and the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip deteriorates, is fueling unprecedented public discontent in Gaza with the militant group that seized power there almost two decades ago.

“Hamas drove the bus to the edge and lost control,” said Omaima Abu Eida, a 58-year-old Gaza resident. “They are not negotiating for us, they are negotiating to stay in power after all this devastation.”

Fadi Awad, 32, an electrician and father of five living in a tent in central Gaza, said he was fed up with the negotiations and that Hamas was out of touch. “We hear positive talks, then pull back, then breakthrough, then it all falls apart and with it, our lives,” Awad said.

“Our leaders, Hamas, the Arabs, they watch us on TV from their hotels,” he added. “[They] do not know what it’s like to run for your life, hungry and barefoot.”

Of course, that doesn’t mean that the ‘Palestinians’ don’t hate the Jews much more than they dislike Hamas!

But there’s a logical disconnect here: Israel does not have to ‘negotiate’ a ceasefire. Since the ‘Palestinians’ cannot do much more than lob a couple of harmless rockets at Israel at this point, Israel can decide to stop shooting at the ‘Palestinians’ any time they choose. The only sticking point is the hostages. Yet CNN reported, at 9:15 PM EDT Thursday night that a senior Hamas official, Osama Hamdan, stated that no one really knows how many of the 120 remaining hostages are even still alive.

Speaking to CNN in the Lebanese capital Beirut, Hamdan said the latest proposal on the table – an Israeli plan that was first publicly announced by US President Joe Biden late last month – did not meet the group’s demands for an end to the war.

Hamdan told CNN that Hamas needed “a clear position from Israel to accept the ceasefire, a complete withdrawal from Gaza, and let the Palestinians to determine their future by themselves, the reconstruction, the (lifting) of the siege … and we are ready to talk about a fair deal about the prisoners exchange.”

Wait, what? The current proposal “(does) not meet the group’s demands for an end to the war”?

Mr Hamdan is saying, in effect, that Israel has to give Hamas something that they have not won on the battlefield to end the war!

Getting back the 120 remaining hostages is a laudable goal, but it really should not drive Israeli policy. The hostages are Hamas’ only remaining weapon, but they are a weapon only if the Israelis allow them to be.

Back to the Journal:

Support for Hamas as rulers in Gaza has fallen to 46% from 52% over the past three months, according to a survey of more than 700 residents of the enclave. In the West Bank, the trend is reversed, with 71% of Palestinians surveyed supporting Hamas’s continued rule in Gaza, up from 64% in the previous poll, by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research.

So, the ‘Palestinians’ who are not being shot and burned and bombed support Hamas continuing to fight, while those who are in the path of the IDF aren’t nearly as happy about it. That makes them like a lot of the Hamas leadership, safely living in Lebanon and Qatar and Egypt.

The Hamas military leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, is calculating that more fighting and more Palestinian civilian deaths work to his advantage, messages he has sent to cease fire mediators and Hamas colleagues show.

Taking that to its logical conclusion — as if anything Mr Sinwar says has any actual logic — if Israel simply kills them all, it’s to Hamas’ greatest advantage!

Hamas and the ‘Palestinians’ are not people with whom the civilized West can negotiate; they are simply barbarians who must be defeated, defeated so thoroughly that they can never rise again.