Trump thinks he has a solution for the Hamas question?
Or it’s just gonna go away?
Israel said on Sunday its military was conducting a “large-scale operation” to locate the body of the last hostage in Gaza, adding that it would only reopen the Rafah crossing with Egypt after the mission was completed.
The statement came as Israel’s cabinet met to discuss the possibility of opening the key border crossing, and a day after top US envoys met prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and reportedly urged him to reopen the vital entry point for aid into Gaza.
Israel’s demand for the return of the last hostage, Ran Gvili, has been widely seen as the last obstacle to opening the Rafah crossing and beginning the US-brokered ceasefire’s second phase. The border was supposed to have opened during the initial phase of Donald Trump’s plan to end the war last October.
Israel conditioned the reopening on the return of all living hostages held by Palestinian militant factions in Gaza, as well as a “100% effort” by Hamas to locate and return the bodies of all deceased hostages. All have been returned except for the body of Gvili, a police officer.
The Israeli military “is currently conducting a focused operation to exhaust all of the intelligence that has been gathered in the effort to locate and return the fallen hostage, Master Sgt. Ran Gvili, of blessed memory,” Netanyahu’s office said in a statement, adding that once this search operation is “exhausted” Israel will open the Rafah crossing.
On Thursday, Ali Shaath, head of a transitional Palestinian committee backed by the US to temporarily administer Gaza, said the Rafah Crossing would open this week. It is effectively the sole route in or out of Gaza for nearly all of the more than 2 million people who live there.
The Gaza side of the crossing has been under Israeli military control since 2024….
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Gvili’s family has urged Netanyahu’s government not to enter the ceasefire’s second phase until his remains are returned.
But pressure has been building, and the Trump administration has already declared in recent days that the second phase is under way.
Israel has repeatedly accused Hamas of dragging its feet in the recovery of the final hostage. Hamas in a statement Sunday said it had provided all the information it had about Gvili’s remains, and accused Israel of obstructing efforts to search for them in areas of Gaza under Israeli military control….
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The Hamas Question IS STILL there….
Amid the hullabaloo and self-congratulation of Donald Trump’s “board of peace” launch in Davos, his administration laid out specific plans for the short- and long-term future of Gaza, aimed at a lasting peace.
The blueprint set out on Thursday was extremely ambitious. It envisages a unified Palestinian-run Gaza, which represents a rebuff to the aims of Israeli extremists, including some in the governing coalition, who have sought the deportation of Gaza’s population and the building of Israeli settlements in its place.
The plan’s success will depend largely on whether Trump and his board of peace has the determination to implement the plan, overcoming Israeli objections and obstruction – and whether a mechanism can be created inside Gaza to oversee the disarming of Hamas.
A slideshow presented in Davos by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner imagined a futuristic dreamscape of gleaming apartment blocks and office towers, with neat industrial parks and residential districts – and even an airport. The territory had a slice taken off it to create a buffer zone along the Israeli border, and was treated as blank slate, ignoring the property rights of generations of Palestinians, but it was a move away from a partition between Hamas and Israeli-run halves….
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