The Biden administration welcomed Hamas’s sudden declaration Monday that it accepted a ceasefire in Gaza — though the White House would not say what terms, exactly, Hamas had accepted.
Hamas announced its agreement Monday with unspecified terms proposed by Egyptian and Qatari mediators — just hours after Israel began its attack on Hamas in its last stronghold of Rafah, in Gaza, by warning civilians to leave.
Israel said that Hamas did not appear to have agreed to the terms of its proposal.
That left confusion as to whether there is a deal, or whether Hamas is pretending there is a deal to stop Israel.
White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby refused to speculate at a briefing Monday about what was in Hamas’s “agreement”:
I do understand the curiosity, and you guys are all asking the right questions, all very fair, but I really do hope you understand that the last thing I would ever want to do from this podium is say something that could put this very sensitive process at risk. We are at a critical stage right now. We’ve got a response from Hamas. Now [CIA] Director [William] Burns is working through that, to assess it, working with the Israelis — I mean, my goodness, folks, I don’t know that it gets any more sensitive than right now. And the worst thing that we can do is start speculating about what’s in it.
Kirby told Fox News’ Jacqui Heinrich that he did not know whether Hamas’s claim of an agreement was a “trick.”
Asked about Israel’s decision to shut down Al Jazeera, a Qatar-backed channel that has functioned as a Hamas propaganda outlet during the war, Kirby said that the U.S. opposed that move because “the work of independent journalism around the world is absolutely vital.”
Ukraine banned some Russian-owned media in 2021, which appears to have passed unnoticed by the White House.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, “The Zionist Conspiracy (and how to join it),” now available on Audible. He is also the author of the e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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