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The killing of October 7 mastermind Yahya Sinwar was confirmed by Israeli military officials on Thursday and quickly celebrated with a sigh of relief from the White House.
Both President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris released statements proclaiming the Palestinian militant leader a terrorist guilty of horrific crimes against both Israel and America. And there was a clear sense that US officials were eager to jump on what they saw as the most significant positive development in the war-torn region of Gaza in a while to renew a push for the conflict to end.
Whether that push will have any success is another question. The Biden-Harris administration holds to the idea that Israel’s government must accept the formation of a unified, sovereign Palestinian state which includes the currently occupied West Bank as well as Gaza, where tens of thousands are now dead after a savage year of fighting. Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders have vehemently rejected that outcome, publicly and privately.
There’s no immediate reason to think that will change — nor did US officials offer any reason why the US would suddenly see a change in cooperation from the far-right Netanyahu coalition government. Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, vowed on Thursday that his country’s military assault on Gaza would continue until Hamas returned all hostages taken on October 7th.
At the State Department briefing, spokesman Matthew Miller characterized Sinwar as the key roadblock in the way of peace talks, while acknowledging that the Israeli government had important “decisions” to make regarding how to end the conflict.
“Over the past few weeks, there have been no negotiations pertinent to the war because Sinwar has refused to negotiate,” Miller said. “There's been no path to ending this war because Sinwar has refused to talk about releasing the hostages or coming to a ceasefire. We now see an opportunity with him having been removed from the battlefield, being removed from the leadership of Hamas, and we want to seize that opportunity.”
He went on, pressed by another journalist: “Of course, there will be tough decisions that the Israelis will need to make to get an agreement to end this war, and we have made clear any number of times that we will have very direct, candid conversations about the need to make those tough decisions. But we weren't even in a place to do that when you have no one at the other end of the table willing to even agree to negotiate.”
“We're now in a different place. What that means going forward, too early to tell. But we do believe it is an opportunity that we want to pursue.”
If a breakthrough in peace talks were to come, it couldn’t have been ordered at a better time for the Democrats: Harris is bleeding Democratic support from Arab and Muslim voters in Michigan, according to a survey from the Arab American Institute, running 18 points behind the Democratic ticket in 2020.
With the race in the single digits in Michigan and numerous other states, a jolt in the arm of the Democratic base is exactly what Kamala Harris needs as the campaign enters its final days.
