This IS about the 216th day over 100 people ARE being held against their will while Israeli and Hamas fighters continue going at each other….
Things COULD go like this for a LOT Longer….
I spotlight below the person the leads the Hamas resistance to Israel, Yahya Sinwar….
Here’s what we know:
Israel is marking a solemn Memorial Day amid renewed fighting in Gaza City and Jabaliya that fits a familiar scenario: Israeli forces returning to an area where they had defeated Hamas earlier in the war.
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Israelis say Memorial Day will be ‘even more intense’ this year.
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Israeli troops engaged in ‘close-quarters combat’ against Hamas in Gaza City, the military says.
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The U.N. says about 300,000 Gazans have fled Rafah.
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The flow of food and other aid into Gaza has almost entirely dried up over the past week, the U.N. says….
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The REAL power of Hamas seems to be to confront and beat down Israel along with souring the US /Israeli relationship…Something US President Biden HAS worked to NOT do.….
The plight of his fellow Palestianin’s seem NOT to be his primary concern
Yahya Sinwar HAS been ahead of Israel throuout the entire time from the Oct. 7th attack’s to this moment in time….
As I have guested here…
Intelligence analysis’s are probably right in predicting that Sinwar WILL be hunted down by the Isreali’s and taken out no matter what final “deal’ or settlement in approved…..
After Hamas attacked Israel in October, igniting the war in Gaza, Israeli leaders described the group’s most senior official in the territory, Yahya Sinwar, as a “dead man walking.” Considering him an architect of the raid, Israel has portrayed Mr. Sinwar’s assassination as a major goal of its devastating counterattack.
Seven months later, Mr. Sinwar’s survival is emblematic of the failures of Israel’s war, which has ravaged much of Gaza but left Hamas’s top leadership largely intact and failed to free most of the captives taken during the October attack.
Even as Israeli officials seek his killing, they have been forced to negotiate with him, albeit indirectly, to free the remaining hostages. Mr. Sinwar has emerged not only as a strong-willed commander but as a shrewd negotiator who has staved off an Israeli battlefield victory while engaging Israeli envoys at the negotiating table, according to officials from Hamas, Israel and the United States. Some spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence assessments of Mr. Sinwar and diplomatic negotiations.
While the talks are mediated in Egypt and Qatar, it is Mr. Sinwar — believed to be hiding in a tunnel network beneath Gaza — whose consent is required by Hamas’s negotiators before they agree to any concessions, according to some of those officials.
Hamas officials insist that Mr. Sinwar does not have the final say in the group’s decisions. But though Mr. Sinwar does not technically have authority over the entire Hamas movement, his leadership role in Gaza and his forceful personality have given him outsize importance in how Hamas operates, according to allies and foes alike.
“There’s no decision that can be made without consulting Sinwar,” said Salah al-Din al-Awawdeh, a Hamas member and political analyst who befriended Mr. Sinwar while they were both jailed in Israel during the 1990s and 2000s. “Sinwar isn’t an ordinary leader, he’s a powerful person and an architect of events. He’s not some sort of manager or director, he’s a leader,” Mr. al-Awawdeh added.
Mr. Sinwar has rarely been heard from since the start of the war, unlike Hamas officials based outside Gaza, including Ismail Haniyeh, the movement’s most senior civilian official. Though he is nominally junior to Mr. Haniyeh, Mr. Sinwar has been central to Hamas’s behind-the-scenes decision to hold out for a permanent cease-fire, American and Israeli officials say…
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