Hamas wants to maximize casualties, not minimize them. The more casualties, the more press. If it's Israeli casualties, good. If it's Palestinian casualties, also good because they can blame Israel.
The only amazing thing is that some suckers actually fall for this shit.
Hamas wants a long term truce so that peace negotiations can take place on a more peaceful footing.
Do you have anything to support that?
How can peace negotiations take place if Hamas still refuses to recognize Israel as a nation? Or has that changed?
Another Hamas Peace Plan Ignored
If you want to understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a nutshell, just look at the New York Times editorial pages of November 1, 2006. Amazingly enough, the Times ran a full op-ed column by a top official of the Hamas party, Ahmed Yousef, a senior adviser to Palestinian prime minister Ismail Haniyeh. Yousef repeated the same offer Hamas has been making for years. In Arabic it's called a "hudna."
As Yousef explained, a hudna is "a period of nonwar but only partial resolution of a conflict." It "extends beyond the Western concept of a cease-fire and obliges the parties to use the period to seek a permanent, nonviolent resolution to their differences." A hudna "affords the opportunity to humanize one's opponents and understand their position with the goal of resolving the intertribal or international dispute."
"This offer of hudna is no ruse, as some assert, to strengthen our military machine," Yousef pleaded. And he offered several reasons to believe it: "A hudna is recognized in Islamic jurisprudence as a legitimate and binding contract. . It goes back to the Koran itself. . When Hamas gives its word to an international agreement, it does so in the name of God and will therefore keep its word. Hamas has honored its previous cease-fires, as Israelis grudgingly note with the oft-heard words, 'At least with Hamas they mean what they say.'"
As Yousef told the British newspaper, The Guardian, Hamas leaders can't say that publicly because "there is no support in Gaza and the West Bank for recognition of Israel, and he could not propose such a change at present. 'If I did, I would end up like Michael Collins,' he said, referring to the Irish republican leader assassinated in 1922 for accepting an Irish two-state solution. 'We need to change people's minds on how they look at the conflict, and it will take time. The climate will change if we have a period of peace.'"
But right-wing Israelis, who get most of the space in the Times' letters to the editor, simply won't believe that. They won't recognize the risk that Hamas leaders are taking by getting ahead of their own public on the path to peace. They would rather hold on to their unshakable faith that Jews are surrounded by anti-semitic enemies bent only on destroying them.
Another Hamas Peace Plan Ignored
Israel's acceptance of the hudna proposal would constitute a strategic victory for Hamas and its allies: The organization would be regarded by the Palestinian population as the leading element in the national struggle. It would quickly receive international legitimacy, establish its economic and political control through the generous assistance of the international community, and be able to develop a deterrent military capability vis-a-vis Israel through massive arms smuggling across the Egyptian border.
Hudna is no solution - Haaretz - Israel News
