THE US negotiators attempting to secure a temporary ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas, alongside mediators from Egypt and Qatar, appear to have one goal in mind: to secure the credit for this still elusive but eventual alleged triumph exclusively for the Washington government. 

The emphasis on scoring political points over humanitarian priorities has resulted in the mediators presenting what longtime Israeli hostage negotiator and peace activist Gershon Baskin describes as “a very bad deal” that is destined to fail.

“The mediators want the deal more than Israel and Hamas do,” Baskin said in an interview with a US radio programme, Here and Now.

“I don’t know why we don’t have a deal on the table that’s talking about all the hostages, ending the war in four to six weeks and with Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.”

Instead, as discussions falter and Israel keeps moving the boundaries, only a temporary ceasefire remains on the table. 

It is hard to understand the point of a ceasefire that isn’t permanent. Do we allow medical teams into Gaza to administer desperately needed polio vaccines, other urgent medical treatments and essential food and water supplies and then, once people recover, let Israel bomb them anyway? The whole thing makes no sense. An agreement to stop fighting should be precisely that.

Many of us have read about or seen dramatised the moving scenes of the Christmas Truce of 1914 during World War I, a moment of spontaneity — and the singing of Silent Night — when some German and British troops put down their weapons, walked across no-man’s land and shook hands. It brought home instantly the futility of the slaughter. But the fighting resumed the next day and lasted well over three more years.

Peace should not be a 12-hour glimmer of hope. It has to be lasting, and ideally permanent. But over Gaza, the US — as often reflected in the remarks of US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken — continues to bias the situation to present Hamas as the perpetual obstacle. Baskin says the very opposite is true.

“Hamas was ready to come to the table early on in the war,” he said. “I know that for a fact because I was negotiating with them.”

In fact, many Israeli hostage family members as well as some of the hostages themselves who were freed during a brief ceasefire last November, point the finger of blame for a failure to secure a ceasefire and the release of Israeli hostages at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rather than at Hamas.

One such is 54-year-old Keren Munder, who was released during the November truce along with her mother and nine-year-old son. Her brother was killed on October 7. On August 21, she buried her father whose body was one of the six hostages recovered and returned on August 20.

At the burial, Munder remarked: “How naive we were, just like on October 7. We did not know that the Israeli prime minister would be sacrificing you for his ‘victory image,’ would choose over and over to leave you to die.”

During Netanyahu’s address to the US Congress last month, cheered ecstatically by Republicans and even occasionally applauded by some Democrats, six family members of Israeli hostages, watching from an upper gallery in the US house chamber, were arrested and removed for wearing bright yellow T-shirts emblazoned with the words “SEAL THE DEAL NOW.”

Earlier, the families had joined several members of Congress at a press conference to decry the Israeli government’s refusal to come to terms with Hamas to secure the safe release of all those hostages still alive.

“Dozens of hostages could have been saved last November,” Baskin agreed. Instead, Netanyahu chose to “renew the war.” 

Baskin was equally disgusted at the Israeli government’s positioning of the recent return of the six slaughtered hostages as some sort of military triumph. In an angry social media post he described the operation as “shameful.” 

Clarifying his perspective on Here and Now he said: “It’s shameful because all six of these men were taken alive into Gaza. They should have come home alive. It should not have been considered a massive military victory and a brilliant military operation that special forces went in and recovered bodies. If we are recovering, we should be recovering live hostages.”

Linda Pentz Gunter is a writer based in Takoma Park, Maryland.