How Israel Ceased Negotiations and Resumed Firing on Gaza
There are indications Israel may return to the negotiating table, but Netanyahu is still operating from his well-worn sabotage playbook to maintain his war of annihilation
Over the past two days, some hope has emerged that a temporary deal may be reached to halt Israel’s military attacks on Gaza and to resume the flow of basic essentials, including food and medicine, to the besieged Gaza Strip. Hamas officials and sources close to Egyptian mediators say they have been working to convince Israel to return to the ceasefire negotiations for weeks. The new plans, put forward by Egypt and Qatar, would involve exchanges of captives, a temporary extension of Phase One of the deal, and a roadmap back to full negotiations.
Several Israeli media outlets and Axios also reported this week that the U.S. floated a proposal of its own: if Hamas releases Edan Alexander, the sole remaining living U.S. citizen held captive in the Strip, President Donald Trump would issue a public statement calling for calm in Gaza and for Israel to return to the negotiating table. Qatari mediators told Hamas that accepting the U.S. offer would likely lead to Trump pressuring Israel to resume full talks. A senior Hamas official, however, told Drop Site that the U.S. offer was not new. “This was a proposal one month ago,” the official said, adding that Hamas publicly announced its willingness to release Alexander as a gesture of goodwill and linking it to the continuation of negotiations. “Israel then broke the [ceasefire] agreement,” he added.
While verifiable details of the various ideas to get the talks back on track are scarce, it is notable that Hamas is once again expressing cautious optimism. “Contacts with the mediators are still ongoing to reach a formula or proposal to exit the current crisis,” said Basem Naim, a member of Hamas’s political bureau, in a statement. Egyptian officials have said that Israel has responded positively to recent proposals by mediators, but offered no details. On Wednesday, Netanyahu’s office denied Israel had received a new Egyptian proposal.
Naim said that Hamas is approaching talks with mediators in a spirit of “positivity and flexibility,” but cautioned that Hamas would not abandon the framework of the January agreement, signed by Israel, that included a clear, defined path to permanently ending the military assault and the withdrawal of all occupation forces. “No one accepts that the agreement be a ‘temporary period of calm and the handover of prisoners in exchange for food and drink,’ then a return to war and plans for displacement with new pretexts.”
In the days since Israel resumed its scorched earth bombing of Gaza on March 18, which has killed more than 890 Palestinians, including more than 300 children, the U.S. and Israel have justified the horrors by blaming Hamas, saying the group’s negotiators had rejected a U.S.-drafted offer to extend the ceasefire. While this narrative dominated much of the Western news coverage surrounding the end of Phase One of the ceasefire deal on March 1, the reality is that this was a deliberate propaganda tactic pulled from Israel’s well-worn playbook of the past 17 months.
From the start of the “ceasefire” that went into effect on January 19, Israel repeatedly violated the terms by continuing to target Palestinians in Gaza, killing more than 130 during Phase One of the deal and preventing the delivery of the agreed-upon number of tents, mobile homes, fuel, and construction equipment. Government officials in Gaza repeatedly accused Israel of allowing fewer aid trucks to enter the Strip than the agreed 600 per day. Israel also violated its commitment to begin the complete withdrawal of its forces from the Philadelphi corridor near the Egyptian border after the last exchange of captives on the 42nd day.
Israel also refused to send negotiators to iron out the implementation of the second phase of the deal, as required by the agreement. The 42-day long second phase would include the return of all remaining Israeli captives, living and dead, and the complete withdrawal of Israeli forces and the announcement of a “sustainable calm,” paving the way for the final phase—a massive reconstruction effort in Gaza and the creation of a post-war governing body for the Strip. Instead of abiding by this framework, Israel imposed a total blockade on Gaza on March 2 and shut off or bombed the remaining electrical supply in the Strip. Israel then issued sweeping new demands that fell outside the scope of the agreement—as it had done repeatedly during the Biden administration—and then publicly accused Hamas of rejecting peace in order to justify an intensification of its genocidal operations.
“We received a number of proposals and initiatives, and we responded to them positively and responsibly, to achieve our goals of a complete cessation of aggression against our people in Gaza, ensuring a full withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, exchanging prisoners, rebuilding, and ending the blockade,” said Dr. Khalil Al-Hayya, Hamas’s chief negotiator, in a speech on Wednesday. “However, the Zionist occupation reneged on the agreement it signed with us and the mediators, refusing to move to the second phase and resuming its aggression against our people and our people in the Gaza Strip. We reaffirm our readiness to continue working and negotiating responsibly to achieve our goals.”
Hamas officials told Drop Site that it did not officially reject any proposal put forward by President Donald Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, and that the group’s negotiators had been assessing it with an open mind while making clear its position that negotiations should take place within the context of the signed deal. Throughout the month of February, Hamas urged international mediators to compel Israel to negotiate the technical implementation of Phase Two of the deal rather than permit it to nullify the agreement and issue provocative demands under threat of resuming its killing of Palestinians in Gaza on an industrial scale. In early March, a senior Hamas official told me that Hamas viewed the efforts of the U.S. envoys “positively” and expressed optimism that an agreement could be reached to get the ceasefire process back on track.
That did not happen—instead, the U.S. co-signed Israel’s lies, as happened frequently under the Biden administration, publicly accusing Hamas of abandoning the negotiations and rejecting a deal. The U.S. and Israel issued a series of ultimatums, demanding the immediate release of all Israeli captives in Gaza with no guarantee of an end to the war or Israeli troop withdrawals. In the early morning hours of March 18, Israel launched a Blitzkrieg attack on Gaza that killed more than 400 Palestinians, nearly half of them children, in a matter of hours.
Months of Sabotage
The agreement signed January 17 was effectively same deal on the table going back to May 2024 when then-President Joe Biden announced it as a breakthrough. In early June, the UN Security Council endorsed the deal; mediators shuttled between Hamas and Israeli delegations; and, on July 2, Hamas agreed to the deal after the U.S. brokered an amendment to resolve technical disputes on language between the two sides. Netanyahu then proceeded to sabotage the deal and intensified Israel’s attacks on Gaza and assassinated Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh, the chief negotiator. Biden and his aides intentionally leaked to journalists stories of their anger with Netanyahu while publicly supporting Israel and continuing the flow of weapons and political support. Netanyahu then launched a full scale attack on Lebanon, killed hundreds of people in the pager bomb plot, and assassinated Hassan Nasrallah and dozens of Hezbollah’s upper echelon. Israel carried out large scale airstrikes across Lebanon, and invaded large swaths of the south, in operations that killed more than 4,000 people and displaced over 1.2 million others. Talk of a Gaza deal receded into the backdrop as Netanyahu carried on Israel’s bloody rampage through the region with the support of the U.S.
After his election, President Trump made very public his demand that a deal be signed by the time he was inaugurated, effectively forcing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu back to the negotiating table.
Israel grudgingly signed the agreement under pressure from Trump—who enjoyed wide popularity in Israel, particularly among the families of the Israeli captives—but Netanyahu made no secret of his intention to violate the deal after the first phase and told his security cabinet that he had been given side letters by both Biden and Trump authorizing Israel to resume the war “if it believes that the negotiations are ineffective,” according to Netanyahu. While international mediators from Qatar and Egypt focused on implementing the deal and ensuring the required steps to guarantee a second phase were on track, Netanyahu crafted an alternative plan to create a series of ad hoc agreements that would result in the return of Israeli captives without needing to withdraw its forces or commit to ending the genocide.
If Hamas refused to accept sweeping, new conditions demanded by Israel and a blatant reneging of the signed deal—which Netanyahu knew would be the case—then he would resume the full spectrum war he and his fanatical right-wing coalition partners never wanted to end in the first place.
This is precisely what happened as Phase One of the ceasefire deal expired on March 1. According to the terms of the agreement, Israel and Hamas were supposed to begin negotiations on the technical implementation of Phase Two no later than February 3. Netanyahu refused to send senior negotiators and instead traveled to Washington, D.C., where he became the first foreign leader to visit Trump at the White House after his election. It was during this visit that Trump announced his desire to seize Gaza as a U.S. territory and turn it into a “Middle East Riviera.” Netanyahu and his government then began ramping up their campaign to expel Palestinians from the Strip, either by force or blackmail.
Nentanyahu continued to assure his security cabinet that he had no intention of following through with subsequent phases of the deal and he exploited the case of the Bibas family in an effort to justify killing the deal entirely. On February 20, Hamas returned the bodies of Israeli captive Shiri Bibas and her two small children, Ariel and Kfir, who were 4 years and 9 months old when fighters from the Mujahideen Brigades—another Palestinian armed group—took them back to Gaza on October 7. In November 2023, Hamas announced that the three had been killed in an Israeli airstrike. Former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said that Israel had intelligence at the time that the Bibas children had been killed. “We knew, and I knew at the time, that some of [the Israeli hostages], including the Bibas kids, are not alive, unfortunately,” he said in a podcast interview broadcast on March 10. “The information was clear enough for intel, but it wasn’t clear enough to declare” publicly.
For more than a year, Netanyahu and his supporters used the family as an emotional weapon to stoke Israeli anger and Israeli officials and media consistently implied they could be alive despite Israeli intelligence indicating they were dead.
After the bodies were returned, Israel claimed a combination of forensics and Israeli “intelligence” had determined the children were “murdered” in captivity. Netanyahu alleged, without evidence, that their captors had “strangled the tender children with their own hands.” No public evidence has been produced to support this allegation.
Compounding the situation was the fact that the remains of Shiri Bibas returned to Israel turned out to be those of a Palestinian woman killed in an Israeli attack. While Netanyahu called it a “cruel and malicious violation of the agreement,” Hamas said it was the result of “corpses of Israeli prisoners mixing with corpses of Palestinians,” due to heavy bombing. Her remains were subsequently located and returned the following day. Netanyahu exploited the Bibas family’s suffering to aid his eliminationist agenda in the ceasefire negotiations. The Bibas family barred Netanyahu from attending the funerals and issued multiple statements accusing him of exploiting the tragedy, eventually serving Netanyahu with a cease and desist letter demanding he stop sharing unconfirmed details of the circumstances of their deaths.
It was not until February 27, just two days before the first phase was set to expire, that Netanyahu sent “negotiators” to Cairo ostensibly to discuss a continuation of the deal. But during these meetings, Israel and the U.S. made clear that Hamas would now need to accept a new reality: Israel would only agree to an extension of phase one and with a suite of new conditions. Israel and the Trump administration clearly knew that most of the Western press would go along with the standard narrative that Hamas had rejected peace. “All developments confirm that the occupation only wanted the first stage of the agreement or to extend the first stage after its end,” said Sami Abu Zuhri, a senior Hamas official. “As for going to the second stage, meaning withdrawal and stopping the war, this is something the occupation was not thinking about.”
Israel said it would agree to extend phase one of the deal through April 20 if Hamas immediately released half of the living Israeli captives held in Gaza and the remaining ones at the end of the extension if negotiations resulted in a “permanent ceasefire.” While Israel presented this as a U.S. proposal, Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy, characterized it differently—an initial release of ten living Israeli captives, including Edan Alexander, an IDF soldier who also holds U.S. citizenship and the bodies of 18 deceased captives.
Hamas understood that the only leverage it held over Israel was the captives and to release them in the absence of a comprehensive plan to end the war would be akin to suicide. Nonetheless, according to Hamas officials, they were cautiously optimistic that Witkoff was operating in good faith and its negotiators expressed willingness to make a special one-off agreement in order to return the original negotiating framework.
U.S. Talks With Hamas
On March 5, news broke that Adam Boehler, Trump’s special envoy on hostages, had held direct talks with Hamas in an effort to broker a deal for the release of any U.S. citizens held by Hamas, living and dead. “Israel was consulted on this matter,” said White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt at the daily press briefing. “Dialogue and talking to people around the world to do what is in the best interest of the American people is something that the president has proven is something that he believes is a good faith effort to do what’s right for the American people.”
In Israel, the revelation of the direct talks with Hamas caused an outcry. As this played out, Trump became increasingly belligerent and unhinged in his rants. After meeting with a group of released Israeli captives in the Oval Office, Trump took to social media. “‘Shalom Hamas' means Hello and Goodbye - You can choose,” he began a post on his TruthSocial site the day the Boehler revelations became public. “Release all of the Hostages now, not later, and immediately return all of the dead bodies of the people you murdered, or it is OVER for you,” Trump wrote. “I am sending Israel everything it needs to finish the job, not a single Hamas member will be safe if you don’t do as I say.” Trump did not just aim his threats at Hamas. “People of Gaza: A beautiful Future awaits, but not if you hold Hostages. If you do, you are DEAD!”
The controversy over the direct talks with Hamas intensified over the next several days as Boehler gave a series of TV interviews. “With respect to the Hamas situation, I do think there's hope,” Boehler told CNN’s Jake Tapper on March 9. “I think you could see something like a long-term truce, where we forgive prisoners, where Hamas lays down their arms, where they agree they're not part of the political party going forward. I think that's a reality. It's real close.”
Responding to a report in Axios that Ron Dermer, Netanyahu’s senior advisor and newly appointed lead negotiator on Gaza, had tried to dissuade Boehler from meeting with Hamas, Boehler said, “I spoke with Ron, and I'm sympathetic. He has someone that he doesn't know well making direct contact with Hamas. Maybe I would see them and say, ‘Look, they don't have horns growing out of their head. They're actually guys like us. They're pretty nice guys.’” Boehler then added, “At the same time, we're the United States. We're not an agent of Israel.” He expressed optimism that a deal “could come together within weeks” that took into account the positions of both Hamas and Israel.
In an eyebrow raising interview with Israel’s Channel 11, Boehler revealed details of what he said were details of a proposal Hamas had made for a 5-10 year truce potentially involving an agreement from Hamas to disarm and an “all for all” prisoner exchange with Israel. Boehler added that there would be a process to ensure the destruction of tunnels in Gaza and that Hamas “would not be involved in politics going forward.” Asked when a deal to release all Israeli captives could be reached, Boehler said, “If I want to be optimistic, I would think weeks.”
After these interviews, Boehler—a personal friend of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner—was subjected to a campaign of sustained attacks in the U.S. and Israeli media and a whisper campaign in Washington. The administration fumbled to manage the fall out from Israel and Trump’s pro-Israel donors and Boehler subsequently gave interviews to Israeli and U.S. media in which he claimed his original comments had been misinterpreted. “Hamas is a terrorist organization that has murdered thousands of innocent people,” he wrote in a post on the social media site X on March 9. “They are BY DEFINITION BAD people.” He added that “not a single Hamas member will be safe if Hamas doesn’t RELEASE ALL HOSTAGES IMMEDIATELY.”
Several Republican senators told Jewish Insider that calls for Boehler’s removal were growing with one unnamed lawmaker saying, “It was beyond bad, a disaster. I like Adam, but I think he needs to be parked.” The White House began assuring the Israeli government and the GOP leadership that Boehler would be removed from the Hamas file. On March 14, the Trump administration officially withdrew Boehler’s nomination to serve as the top hostage envoy, though the White House said he would continue to work on hostage issues for the administration as a “special government employee,” a position that does not require senate confirmation.
The Boehler affair, combined with increasing pressure by Netanyahu to get the U.S. to greenlight a resumption of the war, would eventually lead to Netanyahu achieving what he had stated was his goal from the beginning of the “ceasefire” agreement: open ended war waged entirely on Israel’s terms with unqualified U.S. support and weapons.
Red Lines
On March 12, Steve Witkoff arrived in Doha where he presented a new U.S. “bridge proposal” that proposed Hamas release 5 living captives and the bodies of 10 of the deceased. There are reportedly 59 Israelis held in Gaza, 24 of whom are believed to be alive. Hamas officials continued to portray the talks as productive. “We are working with mediators for the agreement to succeed and to compel the occupation to conclude all phases of the agreement,” a Hamas spokesman said. Another Hamas official told me that Hamas had informed U.S. and regional mediators it was open to making a “partial deal” as a step toward resuming negotiations based on the framework of the January 17 agreement Hamas and Israel signed. The official also said the U.S. was particularly interested in resolving issues of post-war governance in Gaza, leading Hamas to believe that the Americans were invested in preserving the ceasefire.
Hamas official Basem Naim praised the U.S. for engaging in direct talks with Hamas. “This is one of the problems we constantly face,” he said, referring to Israel’s attempts to prevent “international parties from communicating directly with the Hamas movement because they had worked over the years to demonize the resistance, demonize its leadership, its members, its policies.” He said that Boehler told Hamas in his meetings that he was surprised to hear from Hamas “objective, logical, and rational” positions that could be “built upon.”
Hamas publicly announced that it would release Alexander, the U.S. citizen, and the bodies of four deceased dual citizens, if Witkoff could convince the Israelis to open border crossings to allow aid in and for Israel to lift the total blockade it enforced in early March on any goods entering Gaza. Netanyahu accused Hamas of engaging in “psychological warfare” by trying to make a side deal with the Trump administration to release captives with U.S. citizenship and claimed Israel had accepted Witkoff’s proposal and Hamas was rejecting it.
The next day, Witkoff joined Netanyahu in denouncing Hamas. “Unfortunately, Hamas has chosen to respond by publicly claiming flexibility while privately making demands that are entirely impractical without a permanent ceasefire,” he said. “Hamas is making a very bad bet that time is on its side. It is not.” Wikoff added, “Hamas is well aware of the deadline, and should know that we will respond accordingly if that deadline passes.”
From Hamas’s perspective, Israel was once again changing the terms of an agreement. “The Americans came and instead of Mr. Witkoff beginning to provide solutions to these outstanding problems and implementing his commitments, and he personally provided these guarantees upon signing the agreement, he instead began working to withdraw from the agreement,” said Osama Hamdan, a top Hamas official, in an interview with Al Jazeera Arabic on March 19. “What Mr. Witkoff offered was an attempt to withdraw from the agreement that had been concluded and begin searching for a new agreement, which the movement rejected.” Hamdan reiterated that Hamas said it would accept the U.S. bridge proposal on the condition it led to a return to the original ceasefire framework, Israel abiding by its broken commitments from Phase One and the resumption of negotiations on implementing Phase Two. “We believe that this would achieve the offer we presented, and respond to what Mr. Witkoff proposed,” Hamdan said. “Unfortunately, Mr. Witkoff was not bold and courageous enough to tell the Israelis that this matter must be done in the right way.” Israel, Hamdan said, “failed to exit the agreement politically, so they decided to exit it through a criminal terrorist operation.”
According to the terms of the original deal, there was no requirement for Hamas to disarm or to leave Gaza, which Israel now insists is a red line. Hamas also remained firm in its position that the exchange of captives must be linked to a total end to the war and that any post-war governance of Gaza must be led by Palestinians. Hamas has made clear both publicly and in internal meetings with a wide cross-section of Palestinian parties and factions that it would not insist on controlling the government in Gaza. “We are willing immediately to leave the governing position in the Gaza Strip and to allow any Palestinian unity government or a technocratic government or any alternative which is decided by Palestinians within the Palestinian consensus,” said Naim, a member of Hamas’s political bureau, in an interview in late February.
“We are facing a huge American media campaign that is trying to distort the movement’s positions and justify the widespread killing of our children and women in Gaza,” Hamas’s Abu Zuhri told Al Jazeera Arabic. “Some are trying to exploit these massacres and crimes to impose their agenda and say that Hamas is the cause of the problem because it does not hand over its weapons. We say to them, ‘You are the criminals and you are the ones who are killing our people, and our people know the truth.”
Hamas maintained that any deal must include a clearly defined path to ending the war and Israel withdrawing its occupation forces. Negotiators involved in the ceasefire talks for the past 17 months told me this scenario was a familiar one: Israel and the U.S. would make demands and offer proposed drafts, Hamas would consult with its leadership and other Palestinian factions and then respond with its counterpositions or proposals. It is how the May 2024 agreement was formed and how the January 17 deal was finalized.
On March 18—just hours before Israel resumed its large-scale attacks against Gaza—Itamar Ben Gvir, the far right Israeli minister who had resigned from Netanyahu’s ruling coalition in protest of the ceasefire deal in January–announced that he was rejoining the government, a clear indication Netanyahu had decided to resume the war against Gaza.
That day, Naim, a member of Hamas’s political bureau, said that the group was waiting for an official response to what he said was feedback Hamas had delivered on Witkoff’s proposal. “If there is an agreement—even a partial one—it will bother [Netanyahu] because this will embarrass him in front of the internal reality, in front of his own people, that there is a possibility of negotiation and reaching an agreement without going to war.”
Naim said that while Hamas was open to making a revised deal, it had red lines of its own: There would be no disarmament of resistance factions in Gaza without an end to the occupation and it would reject the exiling of political leaders from Gaza. “The reason for the existence of resistance weapons is the occupation, and the only way to abandon these weapons is for the occupation to end. Before that, abandoning the resistance project and its tool, which is weapons, is not an option,” Naim told Al Jazeera Mubasher. “The withdrawal of resistance leaders from Gaza is a red line that we will not accept negotiation over.”
The issues Naim identified as Hamas’s red lines were negotiating positions, which, under the framework of the January 17 agreement would have been addressed in the second and third phases of the agreement. Israel, with the support of the U.S., shut down those negotiations and Israel returned to massive bombing of Gaza. “We were up to the last hour before the aggression, we were engaged in these negotiations, and we were near to make a breakthrough in that case,” Naim said on March 20 after Israel resumed its heavy air strikes and ground operations in the Strip.
Despite Israel’s resumption of the full spectrum blockade and massive bombing of Gaza, Hamas said it continues its conversations with Egyptian and Qatari mediators. “We are working with great flexibility to try to cooperate as much as possible to reach an agreement. There are several proposals, and the movement listens to all the proposals, studies them, and expresses its opinions and observations regarding this,” said Hamas’s Sami Abu Zuhri on March 25.
Referring to recent comments made by Trump’s deputy envoy to the Middle East Morgan Ortagus that the White House had “unleashed Israel” and giving it “all the weapons it needs to finish its fight,” Abu Zuhri said: “The American position is a position that has given the occupation free rein to commit crimes of genocide,” adding, “Therefore, we are facing a war of extermination, a resumption of the war of extermination, carried out with Israeli insistence and American cover.”
Jawa Al Muzaiel contributed research for this article.
Very comprehensive piece. There are a lot of opinion news articles which is fine, but we need the complete story that is difficult to get from our newspapers these days. So I will remain a paid supporter because of the hard and comprehensive work that Jeremy does to put this sort of thing together. I am of course beyond horrified at Israel's conduct and it is a most upsetting thing for this 73 year old man who thought he had seen it all.
It is really sad how American main stream news media has become a tool of the zionists.
In reality israel not Hamas is the terrorist organization.
Spinning extermination of the Palestinians as if its a war instead of a slaughter.