Watching now:
3:19 Amir begins, setting out how things started.
4:24 Bibi tells Trump Israel can't deal with Gaza work until the hostages are back
6:00 dealing with Hamas's demands
5:58 the Qatar Dohaa strike (this is the point that Witkoff and Kushner were so angry with Israel over in that CBS interview above that Yishai is talking about btw) and at
7:24 Amir points out the Israeli side of things, that they HAD let the White House know in advance (this is historical record now, it did happen, Witkoff and Kushner are just angry the strike happened in Qatar) Amir says he doesn't know what W &K said to CBS - that is in the Breitbart article Rose has here in the Israel section, but also in Yishai's report.
after that point Amir says the Israeli strike team left the Hamas people alive on purpose to rattle their cages and get things moving. Which it did. It also scared the daylights out of Qatar and got them to a serious bargaining position.
In both Amir's account and Yishai's account above you can see exactly what is going on with Qatar. And this points out even MORE clearly how Witkoff and Kushner are acting FOR Qatar
even while Trump and Bibi N are bargaining with Qatar in good faith.
That is how the hostages were finally set free and this 20 point plan was agreed to.
At 8:31 Amir says this: "Israel had a lot of frogs to swallow here. don't think that it was an easy thing for us."
In any deal like this there are compromises, some very serious ones. In this case getting the living hostages home was priority number one.
That doesn't mean that the rest of the deal is a good one.
In point #3 Israel had to retreat- to a set line, giving up territory they've gone into several times. Israel has lost lives doing this each time, and had catastrophic injuries to some of it's troops that are life altering. How much Israeli blood has to be spilled before we stop forcing them back from the land they've won back by God's grace.
Point #4 Hamas has to give up all hostages living and dead within 72 hours. They've reneged on that part of the deal and begun hostilities again. This should free Israel up to retake the land, this time leaving nothing undone. As long as the US "lets them".
At 9:29 Amir explains this point perfectly! The agreement had no sooner begun, than Hamas regenged.
The point I'd make here is that historically when that happens there are no consequences for Hamas, but Israel is forced to stick to its' part while the US desperately tries to make Hamas comply. That was the pattern with all these land for peace deals in the past, and if the US is trying to make it stick, now, the only party they can pressure is Israel. Hamas already has all it's 2000 seasoned terrorists BACK, freed from Israeli prisons.
9:52 to 10:10 Then Amir says this:
Number five, once all hostages are released, Israel will release 250 life sentence prisoners plus 1,700 Gazans who were detained after October 7th. Let's move to number six.
He skips over the uncomfortable fact that Israel released 2000 plus prisoners already if the other news sources including the BBC are correct that announced that a few days ago.
Again - WHY? Was there pressure from the team to hold Israel accountable while ignoring the fact that the dead were NOT returned?
Next is a bunch of stuff about Aid coming in. No biggy there.
11:13 starts the Palestinian rule. Starting with a technocratic (interesting term there) group that will administer the place. I've read about this, Amir passes over this without getting into it, but it's a group of Egypt, Turkey, and Qatar that will supposedly work to reform Hamas and the Gazans. Considering the fact that Turkey, Egypt and Qatar are the very ones who funded Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, this is the foxes guarding the hen house.
These are the very same people who incentivized Gaza into the terrorist hell hole that it is today. With the help of the UN via UNWRA of course.
Amir doesn't get into this. Yishai Fleisher and Breitbart (see Roses article in the Israel section) DO get into this problem.
Amir goes onto 11-13 pretty much agreeing with everything I've said, and agreeing with Yishai and Breitbart on their critique of this plan.
12:50 Amir gets into the serious business of these international partners, including Jordan that I missed mentioning above.
13:15 Amir gets to the point #15 that I have a serious problem with, and I'm in agreement here with Amir. That is that GAZA will never be occupied or annexed by Israel.
This is where it gets REALLY serious from a Biblical perspective, and THIS is where I'm saying this is the Suicide Borders that Obama wanted. Because Trump and his team have stated PUBLICLY that Israel will never be allowed to annex the West Bank either.
So essentially this is a 2 State Solution that has Gaza on the southwest of Israel, and the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) on the north eastern side of Israel. That creates the pinch points that Israel objected to under Obama and I distinctly remember us all criticizing him for that. Thankfully it didn't become a permanent thing under Obama. Or Biden.
In Trumps first term he was going to carve up the West Bank and make sure that Israel did have and control a lot of it, with SOME bits going to the "palestinians" permanently if they could avoid attacking for a certain time period. Gaza wasn't under consideration then. That was the plan that Kushner devised, that Trump brought out in Late Jan of 2020 just as Covid began showing up in the States and around the globe.
This is a major change from that, and combined with Gaza, this means that Israel loses all hope (from an earthly pov) of controlling Gaza and the so called West Bank.
So far I'm in agreement with Amir, and note that he glosses over some of the points that Yishai and others bring up. Amir is right about every point that he discusses.
I've gone down to the 16:00 mark in conclusion where Amir says this : "So, first now we have all of our hostages back and now we're still there and we're still occupying 53% of the Gaza Strip. So this is where we are now."
I agree.
But Amir is just saying a lot of the same things that Yishai did, in a far more diplomatic manner.
Bottom line:
We got the hostages home!
Hamas will break the deal.
We are still at the 53% occupation of Gaza for now.
Trump did a great thing for Israel in this.
All of which I agree with.
What I'm saying is that this sets Israel up for problems if this gets implemented as it is nothing more or less than another 2 State Solution, especially combined with Trump's declaration
Trump says he 'will not allow' Netanyahu to annex West Bank here reported by the BBC that he will "not allow Netanyahu to annex the West Bank".
This deal, plus that statement creates the exact scenario that Obama tried to do that would have had Israel facing suicide borders.
Amir did a good job on reporting, but he glossed over some of the tougher bits. He tends to do that. But he said a lot of what Yishai said. Just more diplomatically.
www.timesofisrael.com
Illogical accusation, Hamas needed live hostages for insurance.)
(yes, the same war they protested must STOP).
