Hamas Says It Won’t Sign a “Surrender” Agreement, As War of Attrition Intensifies
Trump again claimed a Gaza deal may be imminent as Netanyahu continues his campaign of sabotage.
Since Donald Trump announced on July 1 that a Gaza ceasefire deal was likely, if not imminent, Israel has sought to sabotage negotiations through well-worn methods in an effort to block a deal that would end the war. For nearly two weeks, a senior delegation from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) have been meeting with regional mediators from Qatar and Egypt in Doha in an effort to secure an agreement that lifts Israel’s deadly blockade and restores the UN-led aid distribution system, withdraws Israeli occupation forces, and would see Hamas formally relinquish its governance of Gaza in return for a U.S.-guaranteed end to the genocide.
Immediately after Trump announced what he called the “final proposal” for a Gaza deal, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu undermined the negotiating process, repeatedly announcing—in public—his intent to continue the war after securing the release of ten living Israeli captives in a temporary 60-day truce and to forge ahead with his ethnic cleansing campaign to force the surviving Palestinians out of Gaza. “After the pause, we will transfer the population in the Strip southward and impose a siege [on the rest of Gaza],” Netanyahu told far-right cabinet minister Bezalel Smotrich recently, according to Israel’s Channel 12.
On Monday, sitting in the Oval Office, Trump opined on the state of affairs. “The Gaza strip. I call it the Gaza strip. One of the worst real estate deals ever made. They gave up the oceanfront property,” he said. “It was supposed to bring peace, and it didn’t bring peace. It brought the opposite. But we’re doing pretty well on Gaza.” Trump added, “I think we could have something fairly soon to talk about.”
Israel reportedly submitted new “maps” to mediators on Monday for its proposed troop redeployments as part of a temporary ceasefire agreement. Netanyahu has been adamant he wants to keep large numbers of Israeli forces inside Gaza, particularly along the border with Egypt. Over the past week, Israel has faced pressure from the U.S. to scale down the scope in order to make a deal. Hamas has not yet responded.
As the process drags out and Israel continues its scorched earth attacks, Palestinian resistance fighters have escalated their operations targeting Israeli occupation forces. Fighters from Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s armed wing, and those from Islamic Jihad’s Saraya Al Quds have conducted a series of complex ambushes over the past two weeks, killing Israeli soldiers and destroying armored vehicles and other equipment. Five Israeli military divisions are currently deployed inside Gaza, comprising tens of thousands of troops.
Palestinian resistance forces recently revealed that they had discovered a range of Israeli spy devices, some of which they claimed were planted before the original January ceasefire deal went into effect. An assessment circulated internally among Palestinian resistance groups and shared with Drop Site claimed fighters had disabled many surveillance devices and in some cases reprogrammed them to use in operations targeting Israeli forces. Israeli media outlets have noted a significant uptick in Palestinian resistance attacks against occupation forces. “The resistance eliminated these terrifying espionage methods, emptied them of their content, and even used them in some locations to its own advantage,” the assessment stated.
The Palestinian negotiators understand that unless Trump compels Israel to sign a deal that recognizes Hamas’s “red lines,” the alternative will be a continuation of a war of attrition. A senior Hamas leader told Drop Site that, in the absence of a deal, intensifying the armed insurgency against Israeli forces in Gaza would be “the only effective way of dealing with all their plans.”
“Netanyahu is adept at thwarting one round of negotiations after another and does not want to reach any agreement,” Hamas said in a statement on Monday. “The longer the war continues, the more the occupation army sinks into the quicksand of Gaza and becomes more vulnerable to the resistance's qualitative strikes.”
The proximity talks—indirect negotiations through the regional mediators between Israel and Hamas—began on July 6, and since then, Israel has further ramped up its murderous attacks against Palestinians in Gaza. On a daily basis, children are dismembered, burned alive, or crushed under rubble. Starving Palestinians are gunned down as they seek meager food rations from the sites run by the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, as the Israeli military announces new, almost daily orders for forced displacement, cramming Palestinians into an ever-shrinking slice of land against the Mediterranean Sea on the western Gaza coast.
On Saturday, Israel announced that Palestinians are no longer allowed to set foot in the sea, despite blazing hot summer temperatures. “Entry into the sea is prohibited,” the Arabic language spokesperson for the Israeli army wrote on Twitter/X. “Defense forces will deal with any violation of these restrictions.”
Sources within the Palestinian negotiating team have told Drop Site that the Israeli delegation appeared to be sent to Doha by Netanyahu with a mission to demand total capitulation from Hamas, including full demilitarization of the Gaza Strip, and for Hamas leaders to go into exile. None of these terms are listed in the Trump-endorsed proposal.
Basem Naim, a senior Hamas official, told Drop Site that he believes Netanyahu is publicly paying lip service to the possibility of a deal to buy time to blame Hamas for its failure, so he can move forward with Israel’s war of annihilation in Gaza.
“The negotiations are stalled despite all the positivity and flexibility shown by the movement to make this round of negotiations successful. The reason for this is the Netanyahu government's insistence on imposing [conditions] on the ground in the Gaza Strip that would lead to the occupation army retaining full control over the Strip,” Naim said. “This includes their insistence on maintaining the current aid mechanism, ‘death traps,’ and not withdrawing from the Gaza Strip, keeping large areas, including all of Rafah, under the control of the occupation army as part of an Israeli plan to prepare for the displacement of the population. In addition to all of this, Netanyahu announced in the media that the war would resume after 60 days.”
Naim added, “This offer will not be acceptable to us, and the movement insists on an agreement that leads to a cessation of the war, the withdrawal of hostile forces, and the allowance of aid entry according to the January 2025 agreement.”
Nonetheless, over the weekend, Trump reiterated that he believed a deal was within sight. "We are talking and hopefully we're going to get that straightened out over the next week,” he said Sunday after meeting with senior Qatari officials at a soccer match in New Jersey. Trump was joined by Special Envoy Steve Witkoff who said he remained “hopeful” a deal could be reached. In an interview broadcast on Saturday night, Netanyahu told FOX News, “We’re working on it, but I think we’ll end up meeting all our goals, achieving the release and safe return of our hostages, all of them, destroying Hamas.”
“The Options Are Limited”
Hamas officials have repeatedly told the U.S. and regional mediators they would accept a comprehensive deal that would include the immediate release of all Israeli captives held in Gaza, in return for an end to the war, lifting the blockade, and Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. Known as an “all for all” resolution, the plan would also include the release of a large number of Palestinians held by Israel and a long-term truce, known in Arabic as a hudna. Israel has rejected all of these offers.
The Hamas-led negotiating team has acknowledged that it is under increasing pressure from Palestinians in Gaza to secure a deal, even a temporary one, because of the horrifying conditions and mass killing imposed on the enclave. But capitulating to Netanyahu’s demands, in the view of the negotiators, would be to surrender the existence of Gaza as a Palestinian territory. Short of intervention by Trump, Palestinians have no alternative but to continue the resistance.
“Everyone knows the options are limited. The only thing being offered to us is surrender—as if Israel is winning,” said Mohammed Al-Hindi, deputy secretary general of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, in an interview with Al Jazeera Arabic on Saturday. “Even American and Western media are saying: this has turned into a war of attrition. But we have nothing but our courage. We build our own weapons. We don’t have the resources Israel has. But our courage and faith are leveling the battlefield. The war of attrition is in our favor. Time is on our side, not Israel’s. Israel surrounds Gaza, but it cannot advance. It wants to redraft the map, but it can’t. If it moves forward, it will face even more attrition.”
On July 4, Hamas submitted proposed amendments to the framework endorsed by Trump. It solidified a series of concessions from Hamas, including the release of eight Israeli captives on the first day of an initial 60-day truce. The other two would be released on day 50 and the bodies of 18 deceased Israelis held in Gaza would be returned in phases over the course of two months. Hamas had initially wanted these exchanges spread out to prevent Netanyahu from resuming the war after a week.
Among Hamas’s amendments were terms that would place the UN back in control of aid distribution in accordance with the original January ceasefire agreement that Israel unilaterally abandoned in March to continue its genocidal assault on Gaza. Hamas also proposed that equipment necessary for “the rehabilitation of infrastructure (water, electricity, and sanitation), the rehabilitation of hospitals and bakeries” be allowed into Gaza, as well as equipment to remove rubble and repair roads.
Hamas also wanted stronger language solidifying Trump’s guarantee that the 60-day ceasefire and the flow of aid would continue until a permanent ceasefire agreement could be reached.
Among the most contentious issues, Hamas proposed that Israeli troops be withdrawn to positions laid out in maps negotiated in the context of the January agreement. The original text of the Trump-backed framework employed vague language and suggested new maps would be negotiated. Hamas also included a term that would re-open the Rafah crossing on the Egyptian border in both directions for “travelers, the sick, the wounded, and trade.” Netanyahu has insisted that Israeli forces would not pull out from the Philadelphi corridor along the Egyptian border—Gaza’s only gateway to a world beyond Israel—and would maintain full control over all of Gaza.
Last week, Israeli journalist Barak Ravid reported in Axios that the Trump administration understood that Hamas would not agree to an Israeli plan to establish what would amount to a concentration camp in southern Gaza, replete with large scale Israeli military forces remaining in Gaza indefinitely. The chief of the Israeli military said his forces would seize a large swath of southern Gaza to establish what he cynically referred to as a “humanitarian city” where an initial 600,000 Palestinians would be corralled and fed before being deported to other countries.
Witkoff and a senior Qatari official, Ravid reported, “made it clear to [Netanyahu’s lead negotiator Ron] Dermer that the map proposed by Israel—which involves a far more narrow redeployment than the one the IDF carried out during the previous ceasefire—is a non-starter.”
Netanyahu then scrambled, in an apparent effort to appease the U.S., by proposing a fake “compromise” that would effectively keep the same terms in place. A Hamas official told Drop Site that on Wednesday evening Israel demanded the creation of an Israeli-controlled buffer zone encircling Gaza that would extend two kilometers into Gaza in the north and east of the enclave, as well as a four kilometer (2.5 mile) zone cutting through southern Gaza. The proposal, if enacted, would mean Israel occupying some 40% of Gaza.
On Monday, Hebrew media reported that Israel was submitting another proposal with “new” maps that further reduced the proposed footprint of Israeli troops in the south, but would leave them firmly entrenched in Rafah and in a military cordon around all of Gaza.
“The Americans came and took over the negotiation track—in Washington. They’re negotiating with Israel. Then they bring us the result and say: ‘Sign this—surrender,’” Al-Hindi said on Al Jazeera. “Mediators are working hard to reach a sensible deal — but all efforts crash against Israeli obstinance. If they truly wanted a ceasefire, they’d offer real guarantees. But even U.S. guarantees are meaningless. Last time, Israel took back its hostages and immediately resumed killing. They don’t want to end the war. They want to manage it.”
Drop Site News Middle East Research Fellow Jawa Ahmad contributed to this report.
They can destroy our homes. They can destroy our schools. They can destroy our hospitals. They can destroy our source of information and food and water and medicine. But they can never, ever destroy our will to resist because that’s the only goddamn thing we can still control and we will never willingly give it up!
Thank you for this very detailed summary of the "ceasefire" process. It makes my heart sink. It reads to me like a Kafka story. Hamas enters in good faith believing something, anything, is possible to save the Palestinians, but in dealing with USrael they are "negotiating" with cruel and sadistic psychopaths whose goals were set long ago.
It seems like the only thing that can stop this barbarism is the greater world finding the courage to finally rise up against these entities and the complete cessation of weapons,bombs, intel and the conscienceless communications industry surveillance systems flooding into Israel. The courage, faith and will of the Gazan/Palestinian resistance in the face of such unspeakable terror, loss and grief restores my faith in humanity and takes my breath away.