Feb. 21: Israeli Indecision Is Emboldening Hamas

Ukraine signs U.S. minerals agreement; Hochul not to force Adams to resign; Patel confirmed

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The Big Story

Yesterday, we reported on Hamas’ morbid parade surrounding the return of the bodies of hostages Oded Lifshitz and Shiri, Ariel, and Kfir Bibas to Israel. Shortly after we published that article, however, we learned that the body of Ariel and Kfir’s mother, Shiri, was not Shiri. As reported by The New York Times:

In a shocking and gut-wrenching twist, the military said that the identification process had determined that the additional body received was not that of Shiri Bibas, and that no match was found for any other hostage. “This is an anonymous, unidentified body,” the military said, calling the apparent ruse a “violation of utmost severity” of Hamas’s cease-fire agreement with Israel.

On Friday, Hamas released another body to the Red Cross, which it claims is that of Shiri Bibas, though the identity of the body has not been independently confirmed. The Israeli military also announced Friday that, contrary to Hamas (and left-wing media) claims that the Bibas children died in an Israeli airstrike, Ariel and Kfir were murdered with their captors’ “bare hands” weeks after being taken hostage.

The bizarre delivery of three hostages and the failed delivery of Shiri Bibas coincided with what appeared to be a failed terror attack in Tel Aviv. Three buses in Israel’s largest city exploded yesterday in parking lots all about 500 yards apart, according to ABC News. No injuries or fatalities were reported from the attack. According to a Tel Aviv police spokesman, another bomb, undetonated, was found later that day on a separate bus. Police believe that the bombs were supposed to detonate this morning, not yesterday, to take out civilians during rush hour. Authorities held two Israeli suspects from last night to Friday, according to Haaretz, but the Palestinian militant group in the West Bank, the Tulkarm Brigade, seemed to claim responsibility for the bombs. The unexploded device, according to local media, was found with the message “Revenge from Tulkarm,” an apparent reference to a recent Israeli military raid on a camp in the West Bank. The militant group also published the following statement earlier today: “Revenge for the martyrs will not be forgotten as long as the occupier sits on our land.” Tulkarm comprises militants from a variety of factions, including Hamas, the Islamic Jihad, and Fatah, which is the political party that controls the Palestinian Authority, according to The Wall Street Journal.

According to The Jerusalem Post, citing an account in Maariv, the initial assessment by the Israeli security establishment is that Iran was responsible for the attack, via its supply of weapons, money, explosives, and training to the West Bank militants. The report did not say, however, if Iran was involved at the operational level.

We know Hamas is barbaric, yet by most accounts it wants to preserve the cease-fire deal. To make sense of these provocations, The Scroll spoke with Tablet’s Lee Smith, who wrote to us in an email:

They think Trump is bluffing. They think his talk about pushing Gazans out of Gaza is a negotiating tactic to get the Gulf states—Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE—to throw billions at Gaza. And frankly, Trump aides and the Israelis have not been helpful in this regard since they keep interpreting Trump’s very clear statements on this—Gazans must leave Gaza, not just Hamas, but all Gazans—to mean that Trump is thinking “out of the box” to come up with an “innovative” solution for Gaza. But Trump already gave his answer: They all have to go.

It doesn’t help that in their actions, the Israelis have shown they are confused about Trump’s solution or are purposefully confusing it. By staying in the cease-fire deal—and Trump said he would support them if they withdrew from the deal—they have helped stage Hamas’ hostage theater. People thought it was bad when they released the three men who looked like they’d survived Dachau—those images incensed Trump, who said he was losing patience—but the snuff film yesterday with the Bibas children was more gruesome by many magnitudes. And the Israeli response is what? “Look at what these animals are like, these beasts who bludgeoned our babies to death!” But we already knew that, and now we can anticipate that future releases may be even more disturbing. And why shouldn’t Hamas keep at it? Since the Israelis won’t stop it, Hamas sees it as a way to bid up the price the Arabs will pay to rebuild Gaza while they bring shame to Israel, which has earned the contempt of its enemies and stirred the concern of its friends: Why won’t you stop them? Why are you making us all watch this snuff film?

In remarks to Fox’s Brian Kilmeade on Friday, Trump appeared to agree with this assessment. “The scene is not even believable, it’s so barbaric,” he said of Hamas’ Thursday “parade.” Asked directly whether he was “fine” with Israel resuming the war, he said “I am. I really am.” Finally, Trump once again repeated his preference for his plan to “clear out” Gaza over whatever the Arab states are proposing, in the process explaining why the talk of “deradicalization” from figures like Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar is so misguided. “Another way to do it would be with people there, but I don't see that working,” Trump said. “Hamas would be there, I guess, depending on what happens over the next little while. The question is, can you wipe them out? They are so interspersed among people. Certainly, not an easy thing to do.”

Smith went on to tell us:

It wouldn’t be surprising at some point to see Trump step in directly and end it. Reports suggest this is what he’s saying to aides, that he is sickened by it all. All normal people are. But the Palestinians, as I have argued repeatedly in Tablet, are not normal. When people commit acts of barbaric violence and are never held accountable for their actions but are instead rewarded for it, this is what you get.

IN THE BACK PAGES: Vladislav Davidzon and Mark Galeotti on Ukraine’s losing position

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The Rest

→White House National Security Advisor Mike Waltz said today that he expects Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to sign a minerals agreement with the United States as part of a deal to end the Ukraine war, Reuters reports. According to Axios, the Trump administration has given Ukraine an “improved” draft for the agreement after Zelenskyy enraged Trump earlier this week by rejecting the initial offer. Ukrainian sources told Axios that they advised Zelenskyy to take the deal as it now conforms with Ukrainian law and would alleviate tensions with Trump who, as we reported earlier on Wednesday, was so angry with Zelenskyy that he called him a “dictator without elections.” The widening rift between the two leaders intensified yesterday when, Reuters reported, officials announced that the United States would refuse to co-sponsor a U.N. resolution to back Ukraine’s territorial integrity and demand Russia withdraw its troops. In an interview with Catherine Herridge published Thursday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio spoke about the breakdown in relations between Zelenskyy and Trump around the minerals deal. You can hear what he said in the video below.

For more, read Vladislav Davidzon and Mark Galeotti in The Back Pages below.

→New York Gov. Kathy Hochul announced Thursday that she will not use her powers to ask New York City Eric Adams to resign, despite reports earlier this week that she was considering such a move. She told reporters that she worried removing Adams would cause “chaos and disruption” and ultimately be “undemocratic” (not something Democrats have shied away from lately). Instead, she proposed to install new guardrails around City Hall to “reestablish trust” with New Yorkers in the face of Adams being accused of entering a “corrupt agreement” with President Trump to get his federal bribery charges dropped. On Tuesday, The New York Times published an article in which several, but not all, New Yorkers interviewed by the reporter expressed concern about Adams’ connections to Trump. Hochul’s plan would establish a new deputy inspector general for New York City and boost funding for the city’s comptroller to prove city finances. In a statement released yesterday, Adams said he’s still willing to work with the governor to “ensure faith in our government is strong.” How this shakes out for Adams now that his neck is under the boot of Hochul and the Trump administration remains to be seen.

→The Conservative Political Action Conference, which has been playing out in Washington over the past week, is the subject of scandal today due to its chairman, Matt Schlapp, once again having been accused of sexual assault. Though it should be noted that the allegations were published by controversial liberal social media influencer and “quasi journalist” Yashar Ali, six witnesses reportedly saw Schlapp grope a man at a bar in Virginia some days before the conference began. Schlapp has been accused of similar behaviors by several people in the past, and one of them, The New York Times confirmed, received a nearly half-million-dollar settlement from Schlapp after dropping the case. The person who received the settlement responded to the new Schlapp allegations in a post on X:

→The Senate voted to confirm Trump’s pick for FBI director, Kash Patel, in a close 51-49 vote yesterday. According to The Washington Post, a narrow vote for the FBI director is historically rare; typically, the position is filled with broad bipartisan support. All Democratic senators voted against Kash Patel, as did Republican Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins, who have sided with the Democrats on several confirmation votes. In his 2023 book, Government Gangsters, Patel said the bureau is a tool of suppression of the American people and that its power should be curtailed. While all the Democrats in the Senate were up in arms over Patel’s nomination, none was more upset than California Sen. Adam Schiff, who joined other Democrats in front of the FBI headquarters Thursday morning to protest Patel’s nomination. “This political hack does not deserve to be in the building,” said Schiff.

Patel has previously stated that when Schiff was still a congressman, he was the worst criminal in congressional history. Though he’s been vocal in his position on the corruption of the deep state, Patel has promised that he won’t take any retributive action against President Trump’s enemies as director.

→U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper in Washington, D.C., has ruled that President Trump can continue the mass firings of federal workers, Reuters reports. While the judge expressed his belief that Trump’s blizzard of executive actions and agency firings were causing chaos and disruption in “widespread corners of American society,” he said he lacked the power to decide whether or not the firing of thousands of federal workers was lawful. The unions, said the judge, are required to file complaints with the Federal Labor Relations Authority, which mediates disputes between the agencies and the unions that represent their workers. Last week, Trump fired the Democratic chair of that three-member panel, and the former chair filed a lawsuit to be reinstated.

→Speaking of Trump’s firings of federal employees, the president’s administration has pushed out dozens of government employees from the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) division of the Department of Homeland Security who had been working to dismantle foreign influence operations, says The New York Times. Experts, says the paper, are worried that the cuts could leave the United States defenseless against covert foreign influence operations. Trump and his administration, however, have said that fighting against misinformation has been little more than a ruse to infringe upon Americans’ rights. On Feb. 5, Attorney General Pam Bondi shut down an FBI task force that had been formed after Russia “intervened” in the 2016 presidential election. Considering it was task forces like that one that found little evidence of crimes and hamstrung Trump’s first administration with the false Russiagate narrative, it can’t be too surprising that doing away with them at the beginning of his second is among his priorities.

CISA featured prominently in Jacob Siegel’s Tablet article on the counter-disinformation complex, which you can read here: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/guide-understanding-hoax-century-thirteen-ways-looking-disinformation

→CNN is the first major media outlet to lose its workspace at the Pentagon as part of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s “media rotation program” that also will take away the workspaces of NBC News, The New York Times, National Political Radio, Politico, The Washington Post, The Hill, and The War Zone. CNN’s vacated Pentagon office is slated to be filled by Newsmax. Hegseth said that his decision to remove CNN from its workspace stemmed from its spreading of disinformation and chaos, and took to X to make a joke about the uncleanliness of its previous workspace:

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Ukraine’s Losing Position

Trump isn’t going anywhere. Neither is Putin.

by Vladislav Davidzon and Mark Galeotti

The Trump administration announced the start of talks to end the Russian-Ukrainian war with a characteristic lack of sentimentality. Following through on his campaign promise to conclude the war quickly, U.S. President Donald Trump broke the three-year taboo on the West’s direct communication with Russian President Vladimir Putin. After the two leaders spoke on the phone, Trump announced that negotiations would begin immediately. The question now is: Will Ukraine be forced to capitulate after having heroically fought off the Russian invasion for three years?

For all its talk, the Biden administration did not follow through on its maximalist rhetoric to back Ukraine to the hilt and “for as long as it takes.” It did, however, refuse to rule out various political and military outcomes in order to maximize Kyiv’s leverage in any future negotiations, and to give the Ukrainians wide latitude to decide on their own objectives and strategies. On the other hand, the Trump team began the negotiation process by stating several obvious but deeply unpleasant truths that until now the West had been trying to wish away: one, that the Ukrainians would not be joining NATO anytime soon, and two, that they would not be regaining all their lost territories. To that, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth added that no U.S. troops would be deployed to Ukraine as peacekeepers and that it was time for the Europeans to shoulder the burden of the security of their continent. Furthermore, any potential peacekeeping contingent that the Europeans might muster would not be badged as a NATO force and would thus be unable to call on the mutual defense clause of the NATO treaty if fired upon by Russian troops.

Kyiv was certainly dejected, even as many Ukrainians wanted Washington to impose some sort of solution. The truth is that, painful as they were, the American declarations were part of a deal that had been widely expected and had been telegraphed to European capitals for months.

What has made the pill tougher to swallow for Europe and Ukraine is that they have been the ones on the receiving end of the Trump administration’s blunt negotiation strategy. While the hope is that Trump will turn around and pressure the Russians in the next stages of the talks, so far he seems to be presenting Moscow with significant incentives. For instance, he has ended the policy of isolation, even floating the idea that the G7 group of leading industrial nations could again be expanded to include Russia. Also, while the talks so far have been only about launching negotiations, Trump has opened a bilateral track with Russia without the Ukrainians present.

To be sure, the concessions Trump has made to Moscow to get them to the table have been largely symbolic—not unlike with his previous stunted negotiations with North Korea, for example. Also, these concessions have to be weighed against the fact that Russia, even if at great cost, is making limited but steady territorial gains, and Putin appears to believe that time is on his side. And so, from the Russian president’s point of view, even contemplating a cease-fire or peace is already a concession.

Optimists continue to hope that a deal with suitable security guarantees for Ukraine is still possible, and that this could provide the basis for a real peace. In the meantime, however, such optimism is running against a deterioration in the personal relationship between Trump and Zelensky. There was always a risk the peace process would be overshadowed by the cumulative baggage of Kyiv’s relationship with Washington. Ukraine had become enmeshed in three American election cycles in a row. Having found himself in the midst of the first Trump impeachment, Zelensky tried to placate both Trump and Biden. It was a delicate balancing act, which the Ukrainians failed to maintain at critical moments, as when Zelensky made an ill-advised trip to the battleground state of Pennsylvania six weeks before the 2024 election. Still, we were among those who predicted that the ill-will would be outweighed by Trump’s desire, and campaign promise, to get a deal done that ends the war.

Sure enough, Trump quickly got the ball rolling. But he also wanted to reverse the perception, widespread among his supporters, of an American blank check, with tens of billions of taxpayer dollars funneled to Ukraine under Joe Biden, seemingly with no end in sight. In keeping with his campaign promise, that he would put an end to America being taken advantage of abroad, he proposed that Kyiv reimburse the U.S. for the billions in weapons and other aid with major concessions on rights to Ukrainian minerals and natural resources. While the Ukrainians had previously signaled willingness to entertain an arrangement of this kind—in fact, they were first to propose the idea—Zelensky balked at Trump’s exorbitant opening bid of $500 billion and turned it down on the pretense that it required parliamentary approval, and also claiming that it came with no security guarantees.

By Wednesday afternoon, the disagreement had escalated into a full-fledged public feud. Trump had accused the Ukrainians of having initiated the war, and the emotional and poll-obsessed Zelensky could not resist taking the bait. Zelensky, who for all his personal heroism has proved himself to be far more fearful of falling poll numbers than of being executed by Russian special forces, hit at Trump with pointless and provocative comments, sniping that the U.S. president was caught in a web of Russian disinformation. The two entertainers turned heads of state began trading barbs about their respective approval ratings. “I mean, I hate to say it, but he’s down at a 4% approval rating,” Trump told reporters at Mar-a-Lago. The press poured forth statistics to fact-check the U.S. president, like any of that was relevant.

While Trump may not have initiated the peace negotiations with the intention of toppling Zelensky’s presidency along the way, he responded by calling for new elections in Kyiv and accusing the Ukrainian president of being a dictator. For the Ukrainians, it seemed as though Trump were conceding to the Russian’s desire to remove Zelensky from power as part of any deal. Vice President JD Vance chimed in to warn the Ukrainians that “Zelensky would regret badmouthing Trump.”

Many Ukrainians, certainly on social media, rallied around their embattled president. As the head of the Kyiv Economic School, Tymofiy Mylovanov, summarized it on X: “Trump just did more for Zelensky’s legitimacy than any poll in Ukraine. People are rallying around Ze again because both Putin and Trump are coming for him.”

The bump in Zelensky’s approval ratings may be a short-lived consolation, though. Many in the Ukrainian political class recognize that Zelensky’s options are limited. “The [Trump] administration will break Zelensky if he fights them in public,” a prominent member of the opposition in the Ukrainian parliament told us with palpable concern, pointing out that the Russian bombardment of Kyiv and Odessa escalated just as the negotiations began. He was livid at his president, calling his response to Trump “catastrophically immature and stupid.” He added, “Challenging Trump to a ratings contest? That’s teenage stuff—utter madness. Even if the Europeans would be able and willing to step up, without American technical assistance we would be dead in the water. We would be blind as newborn kittens on the battlefield without American satellite imagery and intelligence sharing. And we would not be able to fly our drones, let alone check our emails without access to Musk’s Starlink system if he decided to turn it off.” The MP concluded, “Ukraine’s death would be as swift as it was intensely romantic.”

As if to underscore this reality, by Thursday the Zelensky government was considering an updated proposal for the minerals deal, and the Ukrainian president’s aides were reportedly encouraging him to sign it. Following a meeting with U.S. envoy Keith Kellogg, Zelensky issued a statement, thanking the U.S. and declaring that “Ukraine is ready for a strong, effective investment and security agreement with the President of the United States.”

The Ukrainian presidential administration is desperately turning to allies, like British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron who are visiting Washington next week, in hopes they can moderate Trump’s position. But with the personal relationship between Zelensky and Trump so poisoned, even European countries happy to support Kyiv rhetorically are wary of being caught in what looks like a personal grudge match. One senior British official told us that “it feels as if Zelensky is taking this as personally as Trump now” and that if forced to pick a side, the Ukrainians “must understand that we can’t pick theirs.”

The irony is that all this fracas may actually indicate that some kind of genuine, if ugly, peace is more possible now than under Biden, when an unwillingness to face the realities on the ground blocked both any chance of discussion and any hope of forcing a military solution on Moscow. It remains unclear what Putin will ultimately be willing to accept. The Kremlin has indicated that it would not oppose Ukraine joining the European Union, and this comes with its own pledge of military assistance, one ironically even more substantial than NATO’s Article 5. Perhaps the promise of being able to retain the territories it has conquered, coupled with a guarantee of no NATO membership for Ukraine and at least partial sanctions relief would be enough for Moscow. Likewise, foreign peacekeepers, sustained reconstruction aid, and a fast-track to EU membership could be enough for Ukraine.