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But 60% of Arabs in Judea and Samaria told pollsters that Hamas should run Gaza after the war.

Baruch Yedid

(JNS)

An Israel-Hamas ceasefire in Gaza will take place in three stages over several weeks, sources in the Palestinian Authority and Fatah claim.

Parallel to this, Palestinian Authority chief Mahmoud Abbas is said to be preparing certain reforms under U.S. pressure that he hopes would allow him to return to power in Gaza.

The emerging ceasefire agreement will occur in three phases, according to the high-ranking sources and reports in the Saudi-owned Al Arabiya news channel.

The basic formula is the release of one Israeli hostage for 30 imprisoned terrorists for each day of the ceasefire. That amounts to 35-40 hostages being released in exchange for Israel commuting the sentences of 1,200 Palestinian terrorists over approximately six weeks.

In addition, Israeli forces would withdraw from positions in Gaza cities, but not from the entire Strip as Hamas has been demanding.

Hamas insists that women and children hostages be released in the first stage, then men and soldiers in the second stage. The final stage will see the release of the bodies of dead captives.

Palestinians would not be permitted to return to homes in northern Gaza, but Israel would allow a U.N. delegation to prepare the area for that eventuality.

Gaza’s new ‘Civil Administration’

According to Al Arabiya sources, during the ceasefire’s first stage, Israel, Egypt, Qatar and the U.S. would discuss a civil administration for Gaza to replace Hamas. The character of this new civil administration is not clear, but high-level P.A. and Fatah sources said the Biden administration is pressuring the Palestinian Authority to reform itself so it can return to running the Strip.

The P.A’.s official position is that it does not want to return to Gaza or take responsibility for its reconstruction unless it is part of an agreement leading to statehood. Israel opposes the P.A.’s return to Gaza.

Sources in Ramallah said Abbas intends to reform the P.A. by cutting back on bloated and inefficient bureaucracy, replacing diplomats representing the PLO abroad and initiating an internal self-investigation mechanism within the Palestinian Preventive Security Service. The U.S. would have access to the internal investigations, sources also said.

In addition, the U.S. demands that the P.A. stop its incitement against Israel and remove inflammatory textbooks from the Palestinian curriculum.

After implementing these measures, the P.A. would supposedly be poised to take over Gaza.

However, nobody in Ramallah believes Abbas will see the reforms through. A November survey by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found that 90% of the Palestinians living in Judea and Samaria wanted Abbas to resign, while 60% said the Palestinian Authority is ineffective and should be dissolved.

Moreover, 64% of the respondents said they were opposed to the P.A. participating in meetings with the U.S. or Arab states about Gaza’s post-war future. When asked who should run Gaza after the war, 60% said Hamas, 16% said a national unity government without Abbas, and 7% said the P.A. with Abbas.

Palestinians have not held national elections since 2005 and Abbas is now in the 19th year of what was supposed to be a four-year term. Since then, Abbas has canceled several attempted elections amid Fatah-Hamas disagreements, most recently in 2021.

Sources in Ramallah also said that the Palestinian Authority would invite “soft core” members of Hamas to be part of the new civil administration, something that Israel would surely oppose.

Image: An IDF tank and solder in the Gaza Strip, Jan. 30, 2024. Credit: TPS.

“Let’s not impugn the good work of a whole agency because of the potential bad actions here by a small number,” spokesman John Kirby said.

(JNS)

John Kirby, the U.S. National Security Council spokesman, on Monday lauded the “good work” done by UNRWA amid mounting evidence that more than a thousand of the U.N. agency’s employees are members of terrorist organizations.

“Let’s not impugn the good work of a whole agency because of the potential bad actions here by a small number,” Kirby told reporters during a briefing in the West Wing of the White House.

So far, the Biden administration has only received information that “affirmatively makes the case” that 13 UNRWA employees took part in the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.

“But you got 13,000 UNRWA employees—the U.N. Relief and Works Agency—you’ve got 13,000 of them in Gaza alone,” Kirby noted.

He added, “I am not dismissing the seriousness of the allegations against those employees. And whether there’s going to be more that will be found, hopefully the investigation will give us more insight.”

In a separate interview with NBC‘s “The Today Show” on Monday, Kirby similarly claimed that UNRWA has been doing “a lot of amazing work on the ground in Gaza, literally helping save thousands of lives.

“They’re taking this seriously. They brought the information to us, by the way. They let us know that they had this report about a dozen employees who were somehow involved in Oct. 7. They’re taking this very, very seriously; they’ve called for an investigation,” he said.

Shortly after taking office in January 2021, President Joe Biden restored millions in funding to UNRWA that had been cut off by President Donald Trump. In 2023 alone, Washington contributed $422 million to the U.N. agency, making the U.S. the largest donor.

Political leaders and watchdog groups have long noted that UNRWA, which serves as the U.N.’s Palestinian-exclusive agency for refugees and their descendants in perpetuity, promotes educational material that contains antisemitism and incitement to violence.

On Friday, the U.S. State Department announced the suspension of additional funding for UNRWA following allegations that 12 of its staff members took part in Hamas’s massacre of some 1,200 persons, mostly civilians, in Israel, on Oct. 7. At least 15 other countries have since followed suit.

The United States will consider resuming its funding to the agency after “fundamental changes” are implemented, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield signaled on Tuesday.

“We need to look at the organization, how it operates in Gaza, how they manage their staff and to ensure that people who commit criminal acts, such as these 12 individuals, are held accountable immediately so that UNRWA can continue the essential work that it’s doing,” Thomas-Greenfield said, per Reuters.

Earlier this week, The Wall Street Journal cited Israeli intelligence findings that one in 10 UNRWA workers has ties to Hamas or Islamic Jihad. The report, based on interrogations of captured Hamas operatives and documents recovered from Gaza, also said that some 6,500 of them have close relatives who are members of terror groups.

“Our intelligence indicates that out of approximately 12,000 UNRWA employees in the Gaza Strip, about 10% are Hamas or Islamic Jihad operatives, and another 50% are first-degree relatives of a Hamas operative,” the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office said on Tuesday.

In a press briefing dedicated to the U.N. agency, which laid out how UNRWA aids Hamas, Jerusalem spelled out three demands: 1. that UNRWA be defunded, 2. that its leadership resign or be dismissed, and 3. that it lose its educational role in the Gaza Strip.

“The minority of states still funding UNRWA despite revelations of its staff’s involvement in the 10/7 massacre must suspend funds immediately,” Prime Minister’s Office spokesman Eylon Levy said.

Image: U.S. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby speaks to reporters at the White House, Oct. 3, 2023. Photo by Oliver Contreras/White House.