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https://www.jns.org/knesset-caucus-explores-trump-relocation-plan-as-only-realistic-alternative/

The Knesset Land of Israel Caucus, the largest lobby in Israel’s parliament, representing some 80 Knesset members, threw its weight behind U.S. President Donald Trump’s Gaza relocation plan during a special conference it hosted in the Knesset on Sunday.

The conference, titled, “The New Middle East: The Plan for Voluntary Migration from Gaza,” featured numerous speakers, both Knesset members and activists.

“It’s amazing how issues that would have sounded completely absurd a few years ago … have today become the consensus,” said Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, chairman of the Religious Zionism Party. “We were thought of as crazy, delusional. It turns out that the crazy people are the knowledgeable realists,” he added.

“I was in the United States last week and they asked me on several occasions what I thought about President Trump’s plan. I told them… ‘It’s the only plan that is realistic for peace, for security. The only one—there is no other way,” Smotrich said.

Knesset Speaker Amir Ohana of the Likud Party said that the world had sadly become “accustomed” to the two-state paradigm as the only solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

He noted the idea had been tested with the 2005 disengagement, in which Israel evacuated some 8,000 Jews from the Gaza Strip and northern Samaria. Israel was rewarded with terrorism and thousands of rockets fired at its cities, culminating in the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas massacre.

Likud MK Yuli Edelstein, one of the co-chairmen of the Land of Israel Caucus, and chairman of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, agreed that “those who thought that the Oslo Accords would bring us a new Middle East were doomed to failure from the outset.”

https://pdavidhornik.substack.com/subscribe?utm_source=email&utm_campaign=email-subscribe&r=

President Trump’s talk about a removal of Gazans from Gaza—while transforming the coastal enclave into prime beachfront real estate, a Riviera on the eastern Mediterranean no less—struck many as outlandish. But many in Israel have taken the idea—at least the kernel of it, not necessarily with Trump’s trappings—seriously, and efforts are underway to get it off the ground.

Late last month, Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer—close confidant of Prime Minister Netanyahu—reportedly “held a ‘tense’ meeting with a senior Egyptian official…in Jerusalem.” The topic—or at least one of them—was moving Gazans into the vast, sparsely populated Sinai Peninsula. The Egyptian official

relayed that Cairo is alarmed by calls from Israeli politicians to push Palestinians into Gaza and stressed that Egypt views any such effort as an existential threat….

According to the sources, Dermer responded by maintaining that the Egyptian people are not as opposed to taking in Gazans as the Egyptian government is.

Alarmed by the answer—in addition to disagreeing with it—Egyptian officials have since sought to arrange a meeting for Dermer with some of the country’s more senior leaders in Cairo in order to further make the case against the relocation of Palestinians into the Sinai.

Unlike Jordan—a small country that already has a large, restive Palestinian population and is under a concerted effort by Iran to undermine its foundations—Egypt has a population of 107 million, while Gaza’s population comes to two million, and no one is suggesting a total population transfer. Egypt’s adamant opposition to taking in Gazans can be seen as a severe case of NIMBYism—even as, of course, Egypt officially intones the proper phrases about the “Palestinian cause.”

For now, Egypt’s President Sissi is turning a cold shoulder to Trump’s overtures for a White House meeting—where Sissi’s NIMBYism just might get exposed to a wide public.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21461/hamas-ceasefire-ploy

As part of the deception, according to the IDF report, Hamas was working to convince Israel that it was interested in calm and was working for economic prosperity. The IDF investigation concluded that Hamas had planned the October 7 attack for more than 10 years.

Today, everyone knows that the talk about a long-term truce was nothing but a smokescreen to conceal Hamas’s real intention of launching its October 7 attack against Israel.

Hamas anyway is not known for honoring ceasefire agreements…. On July 26, 2014, Hamas announced a 24-hour humanitarian ceasefire at 14.00. Hamas violated its own ceasefire a short time later.

For Hamas, a hudna is a temporary break from war — it does not indicate a desire to end it and achieve peace. While Hamas was talking, for ten years before October 7, 2023, about its desire to reach a long-term truce, it was busy preparing for the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.

It is plainly uninformed to believe that Hamas would ever lay down its weapons and agree to end its jihad (holy war) against Israel.

The Trump administration is advised to listen to what Hamas leaders say in Arabic to their own people, and not what they tell US officials during secret meetings in Qatar. Earlier this month, for instance, senior Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri, speaking in Arabic, reassured his people that his group rejects demands by Israel and the US to disarm…

A ceasefire deal will allow Hamas to remain in power and prepare more massacres against Israel. The only solution for the current crisis is for Hamas to disarm, cede control over the Gaza Strip and leave the Palestinian arena.

Adam Boehler, the US Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs, stated on March 9 that he did not rule out the possibility of reaching a long-term truce between Israel and the Iran-backed Palestinian terrorist group Hamas in the Gaza Strip. He also did not rule out the possibility that Hamas would agree to lay down its weapons, saying:

“I think there’s an answer here, and I think the answer is that Hamas lays down their arms. We exchange prisoners, and they [Hamas] go into a long-term truce, where they don’t fight, they’re not part of any political party, and that gives us lots of cooling-off time.”