Talking to Hamas: What is Trump up to?

CrossFireArabia
Opinion
March 9, 2025

There are not enough leaks about the “backchannel” that began late last month in Doha between Trump’s envoy for hostage affairs, Adam Boehler, and leaders of Hamas’ political bureau (reports indicate that the Hamas delegation was led by Khalil al-Hayya). However, what is striking is that these talks coincided with an escalation in threats from both Trump and Netanyahu toward Hamas, warning of a resumption of war and a more severe course of action. Moreover, Israeli security sources indicate that there is a plan to begin the practical implementation of the displacement scheme announced by Trump!

The key question here is what lies behind the Trump administration’s decision to open a secret channel with Hamas at this specific time, especially when negotiations between Hamas and Israel regarding the second phase are stalling. This is particularly intriguing given that the Trump administration has shown a tougher stance toward Hamas than his predecessor, Joe Biden. Moreover, the Doha meetings coincided with Trump receiving a number of former detainees held by Hamas and issuing a strongly worded message, what he described as a serious threat. What is the significance of these parallel and simultaneous steps taken by the Trump administration toward Hamas?

Those close to the Trump administration suggest that this move is nothing more than a “tactical shift” in the US approach without any fundamental changes. The goal is to ensure that Hamas receives the message directly and forcefully, without intermediaries or misinterpretation. This explanation is logical and, in fact, the most likely scenario, as there are no real initiatives or substantial shifts in the US administration’s position. This is especially evident in the fact that the only stance issued by the U.S. National Security Council rejected the Egyptian-Arab proposal, reaffirming President Trump’s commitment to his plan.

So what message did Boehler convey to Hamas leaders? Or, in other words, what is the deal being offered to them? It is clear that the U.S. offer revolves around extending the first phase, or even calling it the second phase, in exchange for the release of all prisoners held by Hamas, including Americans, as well as the safe exit of Hamas and Qassam Brigades leaders from Gaza and the establishment of a long-term ceasefire in the Strip. However, does this include details about the day after the war? It remains unclear whether the U.S. message addressed that issue.

Nevertheless, the American stance remains unchanged, ending Hamas’ rule, disarming the movement, or effectively abandoning its military wing. It is also unknown whether the US has a specific policy if Hamas decides to transition into a political party that adopts peaceful resistance, for example.

Of course, the alternative Trump offers Hamas, should they reject these conditions, is the resumption of war, greater destruction in Gaza, and a forced displacement campaign against Palestinians. But the question that Hamas leaders are likely posing to Trump’s envoy is: What is the value of this threat if, in the end, what you are offering is nothing but the displacement of Palestinians? Why should we accept your terms, release the prisoners, lay down our arms, and leave Gaza if the outcome in both cases is the same? It is unclear whether Boehler had an answer to this question, or perhaps why Trump refuses the Arab plan, which is the most realistic and logical proposal presented so far.

On the other side, an important question arises: Is Hamas’ position unified between Doha and Gaza? There is significant room for interpretation and differences in the language coming from the Qassam Brigades on one hand and Hamas’ political bureau, particularly from one of the movement’s senior politicians, Mousa Abu Marzouk, on the other. It is also unclear whether Khalil al-Hayya is truly authorized to make such a crucial decision for the movement or what the limits of his mandate are. Is there any acceptance of the idea of a safe passage for the movement’s leaders in Gaza or laying down arms and transitioning into a peaceful movement? Or does Hamas still insist on maintaining both political and military strategies despite the severe imbalance of power and the massive destruction inflicted on Gaza and its people? All the choices are harsh and difficult.

Mohammad Abu Rumman is a columnist in the Jordan Times

CrossFireArabia

Dr. Marwan Asmar holds a PhD from Leeds University and is a freelance writer specializing on the Middle East. He has worked as a journalist since the early 1990s in Jordan and the Gulf countries, and been widely published, including at Albawaba, Gulf News, Al Ghad, World Press Review and others.

Opinion

Flying Kites and The Politics of Fear

marwan
August 27, 2026

By Dr Oroub El-Abed

There is something profoundly unsettling about a military power becoming alarmed by children flying kites:

In Gaza, where childhood has already been stripped of so many of its ordinary meanings, even a kite has now entered the vocabulary of warfare. In August 2026, several kites drifted from Gaza toward Israeli communities near the border. Israel’s own military reported that the kites it recovered carried no suspicious material and posed no danger. Yet Israeli leaders responded by treating their appearance as a potential act of war. Defence Minister Israel Katz announced that a balloon would be treated like a kite and a kite like a drone, “with or without explosives.” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Katz subsequently warned that those responsible could be targeted and that populations could be evacuated from areas identified as launch sites.

By 25 August, Palestinian committees in Gaza were asking parents to prevent their children from flying kites, not because kites themselves had become dangerous, but because the children holding their strings might become targets. One mother told Reuters that her ten-year-old son had always flown kites during the summer but that she would no longer allow him to do so.

The gravity of that moment

There is, of course, a history that cannot simply be erased. During Gaza’s Great March of Return beginning in 2018, incendiary kites and balloons were used by Palestinians and caused fires in agricultural fields inside Israel. Activists have examined those incendiary devices as an unusual form of anti-colonial resistance, while Israel characterised them as terrorism and a security threat. But recognising that history makes the present distinction more important, rather than less important. The kites now causing alarm were reportedly not incendiary: a children’s kite is equated with an armed drone, the category of “security threat” expands almost without limit.

Every aspect of Palestinian life has become securitised.

Even a woman in labour at a checkpoint, carrying a newborn into the world, is subjected to the same architecture of suspicion and control. A neighbourhood can be transformed overnight into a military zone following an act of resistance. And now even the sky above a displacement camp, entered only by a child’s kite, can be drawn into this expanding geography of securitisation.

Shrinking of the spaces in which Palestinians can safely live ordinary lives

Across the occupied West Bank, settler attacks have intensified. In July 2026, the UN human rights office warned of escalating settler violence, killings, destruction of property and attacks affecting Palestinian communities. OCHA has documented assaults on homes, restrictions on agricultural land, damage to livestock and olive trees, intimidation and displacement, particularly around newly established settlement outposts.

The International Court of Justice concluded in its July 2024 advisory opinion that Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is unlawful and found its settlement policies and associated practices in breach of international law. Yet territorial expansion continues while Palestinians possess overwhelmingly unequal military and political means with which to resist it.

Historical continuity that deserves examination.

The connection between Zionists Guerrilla attacks during the British Mandate and the present, is not that history simply repeats itself. The Zionists operations continue to be inhumane, savage and far from civilised, territorial expansion remains remarkably persistent. From the depopulated villages documented by Walid Khalidi, to the history of transfer examined by Nur Masalha, to Edward Said’s insistence on recovering the Palestinian standpoint, and Rashid Khalidi’s account of a century-long colonial confrontation, Palestinian scholarship provides its own intellectual vocabulary for understanding what we are witnessing today: displacement is an unfinished process of contesting Palestinian presence on the land. The problem today is that intimidation, territorial acquisition and displacement continue to interact at a regional level as well.

Israeli military actions have extended repeatedly into Lebanon and Syria, including recent strikes in Syria, creating an increasingly dangerous geography in which borders no longer insulate neighbouring populations from Israeli military power. The language is invariably security. Yet for the people experiencing bombing, displacement, occupation or territorial encroachment, “security” looks remarkably different depending on which side of military power one inhabits.

And perhaps this is why the kite is so revealing. The kite made of plastic bags carries almost nothing. It is fragile. It is made to rise, not conquer. For a child surrounded by destroyed buildings and displacement tents, flying one may represent one of the few remaining possibilities of movement. The child’s body is confined; the kite is not.

Perhaps that is precisely why the reaction to it deserves our attention. Children cannot be asked to surrender childhood because an occupying military power has progressively widened its definition of threat. The most disturbing image coming from Gaza this week may therefore be neither a missile nor a tank: It may be a mother telling her child:

Do not fly your kite. They may see it.

That sentence should disturb the conscience of the world. Because when even a child’s kite becomes too dangerous to fly, what is being taken away is more than a toy. It is the remaining space in which a Palestinian child is permitted simply to be a child.

Dr Oroub El-Abed originally wrote this piece for Middle East Monitor and is reposted here in crossfirearabia.com. She is an Associate Professor at Bir Zeit University and specializes in refugees issues.

Opinion

Beware! Qusra and The Next Nakba

Heba
August 26, 2026

By Ramzi Baroud

If you want to understand the bleak future awaiting the occupied West Bank, do not look away. Just pay attention to the events unfolding in the small Palestinian town of Qusra, south of Nablus.

The story of the future of the West Bank begins here.

While much of the media is treating reports emerging from the area as simply another episode of “settler violence,” it is not. Qusra represents something far more consequential: a glimpse into the new Plan Dalet that Israel has in store for Palestinians.

Plan Dalet was the military blueprint through which Zionist forces conquered much of historic Palestine, village by village, during the Nakba.

The plan did not suddenly emerge in 1948. It built on military schemes dating back to 1945, developing into a strategy for conquering Palestinian towns and villages, destroying communities and expelling their inhabitants.

The significance of this history today is not merely symbolic. The Nakba was a process, implemented in stages. So, too, is the annexation of the West Bank.

Nor is this merely an intellectual argument. Israeli officials have openly invoked a new Nakba as an intended outcome. In November 2023, Avi Dichter declared: “We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba,” adding, “Gaza Nakba 2023. That’s how it’ll end.”

True to form, this new Nakba carries many of the characteristics of the old one: coordinated violence, massacres, ethnic cleansing, forced displacement and land confiscation.

The genocide in Gaza represents the zenith of this violence — a more devastating manifestation, but a continuation of the original sin upon which the Israeli state was established.

While all eyes were on Gaza beginning on October 7, 2023, the West Bank was largely ignored, allowing Israel the space to escalate violence in all its forms to levels unseen in decades.

The result has been staggering. Since October 7, 2023, Israeli forces and settlers have killed more than 1,100 Palestinians in the West Bank, including over 240 children, and wounded thousands more. Tens of thousands have been detained, while more than 33,000 Palestinians remain displaced from the Jenin, Tulkarem and Nur Shams refugee camps alone.

Now, back to Qusra.

Beginning on August 9, armed Israeli settlers surrounded three Palestinian homes in the Ras al-Ain area on the outskirts of the town.

They blocked access to the houses, erected tents outside them and cut water and electricity supplies. Families, including young children, were effectively trapped inside.

The Israeli military subsequently declared the surrounding area a closed military zone, restricting access by Palestinians, activists and journalists.

What emerged was not simply settler violence but a division of labor: settlers create the crisis; the army imposes the restrictions; Palestinian movement is curtailed; and the victims themselves are pressured to leave.

And the siege continued. As I write these words, the siege of the Qusra homes has concluded its second week.

Qusra is not incidental to this strategy. Israel has already confiscated its land for the settlement of Migdalim, while nearby outposts including Esh Kodesh have long been associated with attacks and attempts to seize Palestinian agricultural land.

Control of such areas is essential to the larger project of connecting settlement blocs, fragmenting Palestinian territory and transforming Palestinian communities into isolated enclaves.

A few years ago, the Israeli government behaved as though its plan to formally annex large swathes of the West Bank had been placed on hold. Yet, since October 7, annexation has moved from aspiration to obsession — in both words and action.

National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir oversawthe mass distribution of weapons after October 7, arming thousands of civilian security-squad members with rifles amid an already heavily armed settler population.

Meanwhile, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has systematically worked to transfer powers over the West Bank from military administration to Israeli civilian authorities — one of the clearest institutional mechanisms of annexation.

And now another piece is falling into place: Defense Minister Israel Katz has ordered preparations to transfer law-enforcement responsibility over Israeli settlers in the West Bank from the military to the Israeli police, another critical legal step toward annexation.

The picture is becoming complete: settler militias, government funding, weapons, the army, police, civilian bureaucracies, courts and political decisions originating at the highest levels of the Israeli state.

Seen in this wider context, Qusra becomes a microcosm — and potentially a testing ground — for the mechanisms through which larger-scale annexation can be implemented. These realities echo the past. The Nakba did not simply ‘happen,’ but followed years of planning and incremental military schemes. That is why Qusra matters.

Some governments are warning of accelerating annexation; others sanction individual settlers, as though targeting a few extremists could reverse a blueprint implemented by an entire state apparatus.

Palestinians in the West Bank are fully aware of the challenge awaiting them. Urging the Palestinian Authority, which maintains security coordination with Israel, to suddenly devise a ‘strategy’ is painfully redundant.

But for the rest of us who understand the horrors of the Nakba — and the reverberations of that catastrophe from Deir Yassin to the genocide in Gaza — recognition is no longer enough.

The price of silence is already being paid by every Gazan living among the ruins of the Strip and every Palestinian in the West Bank confronting the violence of settlers and their military partners.

It needs to end now, before Qusra becomes the blueprint for what comes next: today, Qusra; tomorrow, the whole of the West Bank.

Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of eight books. His latest book, ‘Before the Flood,’ was published by Seven Stories Press. His other books include ‘Our Vision for Liberation’, ‘My Father was a Freedom Fighter’ and ‘The Last Earth’. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA). He contributed this article to The Jordan Times.

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Talking to Hamas: What is Trump up to?

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