Zionist Analyst: Netanyahu turns defeats into victories.
Ben Caspit emphasized in a note published on the Walla news website on Friday that an official familiar with the details of the prisoner exchange negotiations told me: “It is very important to keep in mind one thing: the agreement that we are now trying to complete is more or less the same agreement plan that was proposed four months ago.”
At the same time, Hamas had agreed to release six prisoners in the first phase, now two more have been added to this number, bringing the total to eight, which could have been added at the same time, and this was known to all those involved in the negotiations, as the remaining gaps were minimal at the time, but the agreement was not reached until 40 more Israeli soldiers were killed in Gaza during this period.
Netanyahu does not say this in front of the cameras or in his recorded messages, and most media activists do not say this either, because they are afraid that there is some kind of wandering and evil spirit here that has seized freedom of expression and is dictating the official narrative to everyone. This is the opinion of most media activists who are not political, and there is a simple reason for this, because the reality has been sufficiently exposed for everyone.
But what has changed here? The change that has occurred is that Netanyahu can hang on to a (pretended) face of victory, meaning that Netanyahu’s narrative of victory has changed, he can bring up the issue of Iran this time, even though everyone knows that he was the furthest from achieving victory in this war, so he gathered all his courage, mobilized all his strength to at least advance this agreement, even if it means bypassing Ben-Gweir and Smotrich.
Until this is done, the Israeli army will continue its failed pursuit from tunnel to tunnel in Gaza just so that it can fulfill the illusions of these two extremists, illusions that are imagined in the re-establishment of the settlement of Gush Qatif in the Gaza Strip, while Netanyahu does not mind using it to achieve his political goals.
This opinion was echoed by Gadi Eisenkot, a member of the Knesset and former member of the Zionist regime’s war cabinet, who wrote in a post on his Facebook page: “Why doesn’t Netanyahu stop this absolute nonsense? On May 27, 2024, an agreement was proposed and approved by consensus. That agreement, like this one, was based on four principles: prisoner exchange, permanent ceasefire, withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, and reconstruction of the Gaza Strip in exchange for the disarmament of the Palestinian groups in it.”