On Thursday, Ed Morrissey at Hot Air posted an article about the rapid changes happening in the war in Gaza. Hamas is in an awkward position now that a lot of the leadership in Iran has been removed. It is not clear how much funding Hamas continues to get from Iran. Evidently other countries in the Middle East have taken note of the recent actions against Iran.
The article reports:
Symbolic? Maybe, maybe not. If true, Hamas leaders didn’t just get a soft ultimatum from Donald Trump this week.
Yesterday, Trump warned Hamas that the final deal for a cease-fire in Gaza was on the table, and that all other options would get “MUCH WORSE.” Qatar may have decided to raise the stakes to something more personal for Hamas’ billionaire clique in Doha:
Doha-based senior Hamas leaders have been told to lay down their arms as part of the efforts to reach a ceasefire deal with Israel, according to a Thursday morning report from The Times newspaper. …
The Times stated that those told to lay down their weapons were “the most senior Hamas leaders outside Gaza, including the lead negotiator Khalil al-Hayya and other key figures.”
One of the key figures reportedly included Hamas political bureau member Zaher Jabareen, “a founder of the group’s military wing in the West Bank.”
An additional bureau member told to lay down weapons was Muhammad Ismail Darwish, who had “met the leaders of Iran and Turkey this year while shuttling between Cairo and Doha for indirect negotiations with Israel,” the report said.
The Times credits this as a “symbolic reflection of Hamas’ interest in the ceasefire proposal,” but that doesn’t make much sense. If Hamas wanted to send that kind of signal, their Qatar contingent would have voluntarily and unilaterally disarmed. They wouldn’t have needed the Qataris to order them to disarm.
That makes this sound like a much different kind of signal. The Qataris are likely as tired of playing the Hamas Hokey Pokey as everyone else, for one thing, while their leadership fattens up on “aid” meant for Palestinians. However, it may mean more than that, especially after the strike on Fordow by Trump and the B-2 bombers. That didn’t just send a signal to Tehran, but to Doha as well — and the rocket fire on Qatar afterward probably didn’t help, either.
This is definitely a wait-and-see moment. It is very possible that the attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities may have had a larger impact than initially realized.