At 7.40pm on Monday 6 May, Hamas issued a statement saying that it had accepted a ceasefire proposal offered by Qatari and Egyptian mediators. Spontaneous demonstrations, led by the relatives of Israelis who were kidnapped on 7 October, broke out in Tel Aviv and elsewhere in Israel, calling for the government to accept the deal. At 10pm on the same night came the first reports from Rafah indicating that the long awaited and feared Israeli attack had begun.
In a nutshell, this sequence of events reflects the contradictory situation in which Israel finds itself: on the one hand, growing voices saying that the only way to bring back the hostages is to end the war, a demand that was almost a taboo until just a few weeks ago; and on the other, the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, reluctant to accept any end to the war, claiming that the only way to bring back the hostages is through military pressure, in Rafah and elsewhere.
