Gaza reprieved, Geneva match-fixed, devolution auctioned, Venezuela targeted

President Trump’s push for peace is indubitably much more positive than negative. Innocent, endearing children are not being blown to bits every hour and hospitals aren’t being bombed. There is hope.

- By Dr. Dayan Jayatilleka

However short the respite from the horror, it must be hailed and Trump thanked, together with the Arab and OIC states, chiefly Qatar, Egypt and Turkey:

What happens after this first phase of Israeli hostage release and Palestinian prisoner/detainee return? If Israel wanted a lasting peace, or to balance-off Hamas, it would have released Marwan Barghouti, a leader of Yasser Arafat’s Fatah, not Hamas, and the closest to a Palestinian Nelson Mandela, but it didn’t do so. If the US seriously wanted a viable, lasting peace and to neutralise Hamas, it would secure the release of Barghouti, but it hasn't.

Israel and the US want Hamas to disarm-in effect, surrender. That’s illogical. The mighty Israeli military machine, technologically the world’s second most sophisticated after the US Leviathan, reducing to rubble and ashes the Gaza strip, an oblong box without natural cover (forests, hills), massacring women and children to the extent of 80% of the casualties, has been unable to decimate the tunnel-ensconced Hamas in two years. The head of the BBC’s Arabic service estimates that of the total casualties in Gaza only 15% are Hamas fighters.

This is unlike the Sri Lankan armed forces which, under the political leadership of President Mahinda Rajapaksa devastated the far more formidable LTTE (heavy artillery, navy, fledgling air-force), in rugged jungle and rural terrain with a long sea border, in under three years—and with an incomparably smaller ratio of civilian casualties to armed combatants.