The Daily Populous Wednesday July 17th, 2024 morning edition
Authored by edition.cnn.com and submitted by aWhiteWildLion

The CIA has assessed that the leader of Hamas in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, is coming under increased pressure from his own military commanders to accept a ceasefire deal and end the war with Israel, CIA Director Bill Burns told a closed-door conference on Saturday, according to a source who attended.

Sinwar, the key architect of the October 7 massacre in Israel, is not “concerned with his mortality” but is facing pressure about being blamed for the enormity of the suffering in Gaza, Burns said at the conference, the source said.

US intelligence officials believe Sinwar is hiding in the tunnels beneath his birthplace, Khan Younis in Gaza, and is the key decision maker for Hamas on whether to accept a deal.

Burns – who for months has conducted feverish negotiations as the Biden administration’s point person – said it was incumbent on both the Israeli government and Hamas to take advantage of this moment, more than nine months since the war started, to reach a ceasefire.

But the internal pressure Sinwar is now facing is new in the past two weeks, including the calls from his own senior commanders who are tiring of the fight, Burns said, according to the attendee who was granted anonymity to discuss the off-the-record conference.

The CIA director was speaking at the annual Allen & Company summer retreat in Sun Valley, Idaho, sometimes called a “summer camp for billionaires” because of its glitzy guest list of tech moguls, media titans and senior government officials who are invited to the secretive week-long event.

The increased pressure on Sinwar comes as Hamas and Israel have agreed to a framework deal that that President Joe Biden laid out at the end of May. That’s what US officials have said is being used as the basis to an agreement to end the fighting.

Burns had just returned from his latest trip last week to the Middle East to try to further the negotiations over a Gaza ceasefire and hostage deal, meeting with mediator counterparts from Qatar and Egypt, as well as Israel’s head of foreign intelligence.

On Saturday Burns said that there is a “fragile possibility before us” and that the chances of a ceasefire being agreed are greater than they have been, months after a brief temporary truce saw dozens of hostages freed in November. But he emphasized that the final stage of negotiations are always difficult.

The renewed push comes after the previous discussions fell apart in May following a similar flurry of meetings and travel by Burns in the region.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is also facing immense domestic pressure to strike a deal that would bring home the remaining hostages held in Gaza. Thousands of Israeli protesters regularly take to the streets of Tel Aviv demanding the government focus on the return of the hostages rather than the military campaign.

“There are still gaps to close, but we’re making progress, the trend is positive,” Biden said on Thursday, “and I’m determined to get this deal done and bring an end to this war, which should end now.”

Israel’s campaign in Gaza has killed more than 38,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health. Thousands are believed missing under the rubble and hundreds of thousands more face disease, famine and lack of shelter, according to aid organizations.

Beyond the enormous amount of detail being hashed out in the potential agreement, talks are routinely slowed by the difficulties of getting messages to and from Sinwar as Israel tries to hunt him down.

Of the three most senior Hamas leaders in Gaza, Israel is believed to have found and killed just one: Marwan Issa, the second in command of the military wing. Its military chief, Mohammed Deif, was targeted by Israel in a bombing on Saturday that killed almost 100 Palestinians and wounded hundreds more, according to Palestinian health officials.

Neither Israel nor the US has determined whether Deif was successfully targeted.

US officials believe that Sinwar no longer wants to rule Gaza and both Israel and Hamas have signed on to an “interim governance” plan that would begin in the second phase of a ceasefire in which neither of them would control Gaza, a US official told CNN.

Qatar has also made clear they would kick out Hamas’ political leadership from their longtime external base if the militant group doesn’t sign on to the plan, US officials say.

In Hamas communications seen and reported recently by the Associated Press, senior Hamas leaders inside Gaza called on external figures from the group to accept Biden’s ceasefire proposal, citing heavy losses and dire conditions in Gaza.

Perhaps an indication of their eagerness to end the fighting, Hamas recently backed off their key demand that a ceasefire agreement include assurances it would then lead to a permanent ceasefire, long a sticking point in the talks that Israel had refused.

Netanyahu then insisted that any deal must allow Israel to return to fighting until its war objectives are met.

That means a pause in the fighting could start, which would see both some Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners released, before Israel re-launches military operations.

The framework Biden proposed says that a permanent ceasefire would be negotiated during the first phase of a pause in the fighting, which would continue as long as negotiations do.

On the same day the Burns was speaking, Netanyahu said at a news conference that he would not move “one millimeter” from the framework laid out by Biden while claiming Hamas had requested 29 changes to the proposal, but he refused to make any.

There are still “tough issues to resolve,” a source familiar with the talks told CNN after Burns’ meetings in Doha. A second source agreed, saying there’s “still a long time to go.”

Electronic_Main_2254 on July 17th, 2024 at 05:00 UTC »

Something definitely changed since the rafah operation started (the operation that every western leader told Israel is off the table) and the hostages rescue operations (where people physically saw that ordinary gazans are practically hamas members and held hostages so the casualties number lost his credibility). Now Israel is efficiently cleaning every hamas outpost with minimum losses on their end and without the intense criticism that they received in first stages of the war, so for the first time since the war started, Sinwar probably feels like he's better to accept deals instead of dragging the war and totally being wiped out.

DroneMaster2000 on July 16th, 2024 at 21:50 UTC »

It is absolutely shameful that the last round of negotiations (During and after Ramadan) were done practically without military pressure. It is so incredibly obvious that Hamas will never agree to anything realistic if not backed into a corner. Hopefully it will work this time, looks promising.

aWhiteWildLion on July 16th, 2024 at 21:23 UTC »

SS: An interesting article on CNN, based on conversations with CIA chief William Burns, the gist of it: 1. Sinwar is under pressure from his military commanders to comply with Hamas' demands for a ceasefire. 2. Sinwar is hiding in an underground route in the Khan Yunis area. 3. There is especially increased pressure on Sinwar from Hamas commanders in the last two weeks. 4. It is estimated that there is a "fragile chance" of a deal, but there are still quite a few negotiations to be done. 5. Communication problems with Sinwar delay the negotiations. 6. Sinwar no longer aspires to rule Gaza, so they agreed to another rule after the war. 7. Gaza Hamas leaders are pushing Sinwar to accept the current outline of the deal, following heavy losses in the military arm and a difficult military situation. 8. Hamas no longer insists that a deal will lead to a permanent ceasefire, due to Israeli pressure and the situation in the Gaza Strip. 9. Netanyahu insists that Israel will return to military action in the Gaza Strip after the deal.