Play stupid games, don’t win stupid prizes
By 
I’m far from an expert on this topic, but this entire exercise seems ludicrous on its face:
This did not go the way Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wanted.
On Monday, the Israeli leader won a peace plan from President Trump that promised him total victory, in the form of a take-it-or-leave-it message to Hamas. The militant group would have to release all the Israeli hostages remaining in Gaza within 72 hours, lay down its arms and surrender any role in the territory’s future — or Israel would be given a free hand to pursue the group’s destruction.
On Friday, responding to a new ultimatum from Mr. Trump, Hamas announced that it was ready to release all the hostages. But it said nothing about how soon it would do so, demurred on laying down its arms, and said it wanted to “discuss the details” of Mr. Trump’s plan.
To Senator Lindsey Graham, a close ally of Mr. Netanyahu’s, this was “in essence, a rejection by Hamas” of the president’s proposal, he wrote on social media.
To Michael Herzog, Mr. Netanyahu’s former ambassador to the United States, it was “a ‘no’ cloaked as a ‘yes,’” he said in an interview.
Yet Mr. Trump embraced the Hamas statement as an unqualified “yes.” “Based on the Statement just issued by Hamas, I believe they are ready for a lasting PEACE,” he wrote on social media. “Israel must immediately stop the bombing of Gaza, so that we can get the Hostages out safely and quickly!”
Mr. Netanyahu’s office waited several hours before responding, after 3 a.m. Israel time on Saturday, that the country was ready for the “immediate release of all hostages.” It made no mention of Hamas’s conditions. Instead, it referred back to Mr. Trump’s peace plan, saying Israel would cooperate with the White House “to end the war in accordance with the principles set forth by Israel that are consistent with President Trump’s vision.”
The prospect of a return of the hostages and an end to the war buoyed hopes in both Israel and Gaza on Saturday after nearly two years of brutal conflict and devastation.
Mr. Netanyahu now finds himself squeezed both by domestic political concerns and by geopolitical pressure from Mr. Trump, from Muslim and Arab nations across the Middle East, and from countries far and wide that greeted Friday night’s developments as if peace had already broken out.
Who actually believes that Hamas is going to agree to terms that require its own destruction? Why on earth would they conceivably do that? Because they’ve “lost?” These are extremist fanatics who clearly believe that the entire Israel-Gaza war has been a tremendous victory for their cause.
What’s going on here is that Donald Trump, the world’s most pathetically childish man, is truly desperate to win that idiotic Nobel Peace Prize, and he thinks that this farce is going to do it for him. (The winner of this year’s prize is announced in early December, [ETA: It’s actually announced next week, while the ceremony is in December, thanks to commenter Muriel for the correction] and I can barely imagine the tantrum to which we’ll be subjected when it turns out to be an indigenous woman who founded 2,000 vaccination clinics or whatever).
What will become evident in the next few days is that Trump’s peace plan, which requires a complete unilateral surrender by one side, is not really a thing, because that’s not a peace plan. Hamas will consider that failure yet another tremendous propaganda victory, Israel will continue the destruction of Gaza — which hasn’t been paused even in the last few days, despite Trump’s bloviating to the contrary — and Trump won’t get his prize, which he wasn’t going to get anyway, because his delusions don’t cut ice with a bunch of bureaucrats in Norway.