Trump has left the stage…..
Now the hard part….
With what to do with Hamas unsolved…..
President Donald Trump on Monday marked the end of Israel’s devastating two-year war in Gaza and the release of the remaining Israeli hostages with a call for lasting peace that would reshape the entire Middle East and could become a defining feature of his place in history.
Though billed as a “peace summit,” the Egypt meeting notably lacked either side of the fighting. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declined Trump’s last-minute invitation, saying that travel would conflict with a Jewish holiday, after at least one Arab leader objected. Hamas was never included, and the organization has refused to disarm, as Trump’s plan would require.
Still, Trump portrayed Monday’s steps as the prelude to a broader reshaping of the region, hoping to build on his first term’s Abraham Accords that normalized Israel’s relations with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan. His overture extended even to Iran, whose nuclear sites the U.S. bombed in June….
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Palestinians in Gaza expressed relief on Monday that Israel had halted its two-year military offensive in the territory, and that hostages and prisoners had been exchanged. Still, many felt there was little to celebrate.
Two years of war left the enclave in ruins, its cities reduced to rubble, tens of thousands dead and the health system devastated. Despair and hopelessness are pervasive and many no longer see a future.
“It’s important that the bombing has stopped, but there’s nothing to be happy about,” said Saed Abu Aita, 44, who is displaced in central Gaza. “My two daughters were killed, my home was destroyed and my health has deteriorated.”
Israel’s military campaign against Hamas killed more than 67,000 people in Gaza, according to local health officials. Their tolls do not specify the number of combatants, but they say thousands were children.
Some in Gaza said they do not see the release on Monday of nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners — one of Hamas’s stated reasons for launching the war in the first place — as an achievement worth the cost.
Hamas secured the exchange by trading the remaining hostages out of the some 250 seized during the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on southern Israel that ignited the war….
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While Hamas has expressed willingness to hand civilian rule over Gaza to another Palestinian entity, it has not committed to giving up its weapons.
Since Israel halted its military offensive and pulled back from parts of Gaza in the past few days, Hamas has begun reasserting itself on the streets of the territory….
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Egypt’s president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi held a meeting on Monday with the presidents of France and Turkey, and Qatar’s emir and others to help coordinate the implementation of the Gaza ceasefire and reconstruction efforts for the territory, according to a statement by the Egyptian president’s office. The meeting was held on the sidelines of an international summit in Egypt’s Sharm el-Sheikh to finalise an agreement aimed at ending the war in Gaza.
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Hamas has started deploying armed fighters and police across parts of Gaza in an apparent attempt to reassert authority in the devastated Palestinian territory after the ceasefire deal agreed with Israel last week. Images showed dozens of Hamas fighters at a hospital in southern Gaza during the release of Israeli hostages on Monday morning and there were reports of shootings and executions elsewhere in the territory.
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A last-minute plan by Donald Trump to invite Benjamin Netanyahu to a multinational Gaza summit in Egypt had to be aborted after the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, said he would not land his plane in Sharm el-Sheikh if the invitation stood. The mid-air power power struggle started after it was announced that the Israeli prime minister had accepted a late invitation from Trump to the conference being jointly chaired by the US president and his Egyptian counterpart, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, in Egypt.
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Two busloads of Palestinian detainees were transferred from Israeli prisons to Ramallah, in the occupied West Bank, on Monday, where jubilant crowds awaited them. In total, 88 of the nearly 2,000 prisoners were sent to the West Bank, with the rest deported to Gaza, according to the Palestinian Prisoners’ Commission.
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Trump declared that the ceasefire agreement marks the end of Israel’s war on Gaza, as well as the end of the “age of terror and death”. Speaking to the Knesset, the US president said: ‘This is not only the end of a war. This is the end of the age of terror and death and the beginning of the age of faith and hope and of God.”
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Netanyahu said Trump is the greatest friend Israel has ever had. “Donald Trump is the greatest friend that the State of Israel has ever had in the White House,” he told the Knesset. “No American president has ever done more for the state of Israel, and as I said in Washington, it ain’t even close,” the Israeli prime minister said.
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At least 67,869 Palestinian people have been killed and 170,105 others injured in Israeli attacks on Gaza since 7 October 2023, the Gaza health ministry said in a statement on Monday. In a statement, the health ministry said the bodies of 63 people, including 60 recovered from rubble, arrived in hospitals across the Gaza Strip over the latest 24-hour reporting period….
Tonight’s daily post on this will address the BIG HOLE in Trump ‘cease fire’ agreement