Politics & Diplomacy
Dahlan accuses Netanyahu of a massacre to kill Gaza's ceasefire chance
Photo: Mohammad Dahlan's verified Facebook page (screenshot)
Original Reporting
Mohammad Dahlan, the exiled Fatah leader whose channel to Washington carried yesterday's promise of a halt, accused Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday evening of committing a massacre in Gaza to destroy the ceasefire opportunity — and recast the diplomacy behind it as President Trump's work with Egypt, Qatar and Turkey, with no mention of the Kushner assurance at the center of his statement a day earlier.
"We understood since yesterday that Netanyahu would do everything in his power to kill the opportunity that President Donald Trump worked on in cooperation with Egypt, Qatar and Turkey," Dahlan wrote on his verified Facebook page. "We worked for weeks and warned of the occupation's criminal conduct and what Netanyahu might do. Today the entire world sees the enormity of the massacre he committed to cut off the road to the most favorable opportunity yet to begin ending the war and bringing safety to our people in Gaza and to all parties." He closed with a pledge: "We promise our people to work night and day to stop the aggression and save our people from the crimes of Netanyahu and his government."
The statement is the third act in a running sequence this newspaper has documented hour by hour. On Saturday evening, minutes after the factions approved the fifteen-clause framework, Dahlan announced that US envoy Jared Kushner had "confirmed" Israel would halt its attacks from Sunday morning. Within hours that post was replaced with softer language — Kushner "working with" the Israeli side — and no halt came: Israeli strikes continued through Saturday and into Sunday, and Hani Almadhoun of UNRWA USA counted eighteen Palestinians killed in Gaza in the hours after the original promise circulated, in the account this newspaper carried earlier today. Palestinian channels reported further deadly strikes on Sunday, including an attack on a vehicle near the Sharia court in Gaza City that killed at least four people, in wire accounts that could not yet be independently verified in full. Sunday evening's statement converts the arc into an accusation: the halt did not fail, in Dahlan's telling — Netanyahu killed it, and the massacre is the proof.
Two shifts in the wording carry their own news. Kushner, Saturday's guarantor by name, appears nowhere in Sunday's text; the opportunity now belongs to "President Trump in cooperation with Egypt, Qatar and Turkey" — the first time Dahlan has publicly placed Ankara inside the mediation alongside Cairo and Doha. And where Saturday's post promised an outcome with a deadline, Sunday's promises only effort without one. No response had been issued by Netanyahu's office, the White House or Kushner by the time of publication, and the scale of Sunday's casualties awaited confirmation from Gaza's medical authorities. What is already confirmed is the measure this newspaper set for the fifteen-clause bargain when the first promise appeared: not the eloquence of the statements — which now accumulate daily — but the silence of the guns, which has yet to arrive.
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