Five years ago, the leader of Hamas in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, scrawled a note on a document that he knew Egyptian intermediaries would hand to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Take a “‘calculated risk’ on a ceasefire,” Sinwar wrote in Hebrew, according to former National Security Adviser Meir Ben-Shabbat.
Not long before, the Hamas chief had said something similar to an Italian journalist: “I don’t want war anymore. I want a ceasefire.” His ambition for the impoverished Palestinian coastal strip? “We can be like Singapore, like Dubai.”
In the wake of Hamas’s long-planned and brutal Oct. 7 assault on Israel, the Israeli security establishment is looking back on his words in a new light: as part of an effort to create the illusion that Hamas, considered a terrorist group by the US and European Union, was limiting its embrace of violence to focus on governance.
Israeli officials now acknowledge that a sense of complacency had set in around Hamas. In recent years, the military had greatly reduced its surveillance of the Gaza border fence, relying on electronic sensors and transferring troops out of the area to guard settlements in the West Bank.
As Israeli analyst Chen Artzi Sror wrote recently in the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper, ambitious military intelligence analysts preferred to focus on Iran and Syria because working on Palestinian issues was not considered of existential importance.
The overarching sentiment was that Hamas had been deterred, and that the real challenges lay further afield.
“Sinwar read the Israeli consciousness very well,” said Michael Milshtein, former head of Palestinian research for the military’s intelligence department. “He wanted Israel to believe that Hamas was concentrating on stability in Gaza, promoting civil affairs. He planted this wrong idea in the minds of Israelis.”
India’s economy will become carbon neutral by the year 2070, the country’s prime minster has announced at the COP26 climate crisis summit in Glasgow. The target date is two decades beyond what scientists say is needed to avert catastrophic climate impacts. India is the last of the world’s major carbon polluters to announce a net-zero target, with China saying it would reach that goal in 2060, and the United States and the European Union aiming for 2050.
China's carbon emissions are vast and growing, dwarfing those of other countries. Experts agree that without big reductions in China's emissions, the world cannot win the fight against climate change. In 2020, China's President Xi Jinping said his country would aim for its emissions to reach their highest point before 2030 and for carbon neutrality before 2060. His statement has now been confirmed as China's official position ahead of the COP26 global climate summit in Glasgow. But China has not said exactly how these goals will be achieved.
China's carbon emissions are vast and growing, dwarfing those of other countries. Experts agree that without big reductions in China's emissions, the world cannot win the fight against climate change. In 2020, China's President Xi Jinping said his country would aim for its emissions to reach their highest point before 2030 and for carbon neutrality before 2060. His statement has now been confirmed as China's official position ahead of the COP26 global climate summit in Glasgow. But China has not said exactly how these goals will be achieved.
A crucial U.N. conference heard calls on its first day for the world's major economies to keep their promises of financial help to address the climate crisis, while big polluters India and Brazil made new commitments to cut emissions. World leaders, environmental experts and activists all pleaded for decisive action to halt the global warming which threatens the future of the planet at the start of the two-week COP26 summit in the Scottish city of Glasgow on Monday. The task facing negotiators was made even more daunting by the failure of the Group of 20 major industrial nations to agree ambitious new commitments at the weekend.