Mideast cease-fire and hostage talks have been indefinitely halted till Iran decides its response to the assassination of a Hamas ally and selects a replacement for the terrorist, who was a key negotiator, officials say.
The talks in Qatar over an American-backed deal to free the roughly 120 Israeli hostages remaining in Gaza will not resume until it’s clear how Iran and its terrorist proxies will retaliate against Israel for the assassination of Hamas’ top political chief and negotiator, Ismail Haniyeh, officials familiar with the tense negotiations told the Times of Israel on Monday.
Iran, which suffered an embarrassing blow after the Palestinian terror leader was killed by a bomb in Tehran, has vowed to directly strike Israel for allegedly orchestrating the assassination.
Fuad Shukr, a commander of the Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon, was also killed in a Beirut attack, prompting another ominous threat against Israel by that group in retaliation.
Iran and the terror groups’ promised bloody attacks are set to affect how the cease-fire negotiations will continue — and Qatari, Egyptian and US mediators are worried that Haniyeh’s death has only complicated the already-difficult discussions.
Hamas so far has not shown any interest in resuming the talks until it elects a replacement for Haniyeh, who led the Hamas Politburo, the council that oversees the terrorists’ rule over Gaza.
It’s unclear when the terrorist group will vote for Haniyeh’s replacement and who the new chief will be, but sources told the Times that Hamas could name a successor in the coming days.
Hamas sources told Reuters last week that the top candidate to replace Haniyeh would be former Hamas chief Khaled Meshaal, the man who was poisoned by Israeli agents in the 1990s and survived only after Israel was forced to hand over an antidote.
While Iranian officials have repeatedly claimed that the approaching attack on Israel will not trigger an all-out war in the Middle East, Netanyahu said the Jewish state is very well prepared for the possibility against “Iran’s axis of evil.”
On Monday, President Biden spoke with King Abdullah II of Jordan to discuss efforts to “de-escalate regional tensions,” a move that came just a day after Jordan’s foreign minister met with Iranian officials to persuade them from attacking Israel and triggering a multifront war.
Israel is already in constant battle with Hezbollah along the northern border, with Lebanon’s health ministry reporting that at least two people were killed in an Israeli airstrike Monday.
The attack came as Hezbollah struck northern Israel in a drone attack earlier in the day, leaving two Israel Defense Force soldiers wounded and causing a blaze.
Meanwhile, in the southern-front against Hamas, a new analysis from the American Enterprise Institute’s Critical Threats Project, the Institute for the Study of War and CNN shows that Hamas’ battalions are beginning to regroup despite Israel claiming victory against all but four of them.
The analysis said at least eight battalions are now combat-effective, as Israel struggles to carry out its goal of completely eliminating Hamas, a goal many foreign officials have already described as unrealistic.
The resurgence of Hamas’s battalions have caused the IDF to retread on areas in Gaza previously cleared out, forcing thousands of Palestinian civilians to evacuate yet again as the war approaches its 10-month.
The new evacuation orders have renewed cries over the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza, which were only further stoked Monday after Israel’s finance minister suggested that blocking humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip is “justified and moral.
“Nobody will let us cause 2 million civilians to die of hunger even though it might be justified and moral until our hostages are returned,” Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said about the pressure Israel is facing to increase aid to Gaza.
