On Monday, Russia plans to host a meeting of the leaders of various Palestinian factions, and the Palestinian Authority (PA) prime minister Mohammad Shtayyeh has urged Hamas to send a delegation. With Hamas facing military defeat, and the U.S. and its allies hoping the PA will govern Gaza when the war ends, this situation presents a golden opportunity for the PA to recover some of it much-diminished clout. It seems committed instead, as Michael Koplow puts it, to trying to “turn lemonade back into lemons.”

If PA officials believe that their current moment of resurgence will last even ten seconds beyond a grand national-unity announcement with an unreformed and recalcitrant Hamas, they are badly misreading the room. That goes double for getting Israelis on board with any PA role anywhere.

The way forward must be to make Hamas less popular rather than rehabilitate it. There is a golden opportunity for [the PA president Mahmoud] Abbas and company to isolate Hamas while it is in organizational disarray, and in so doing build trust with every regional actor not named Iran, Qatar, or Turkey. But that requires a PA that will lead, that will tell Palestinians hard truths, that isn’t afraid to adapt to changed circumstances rather than spout the same slogans and positions and take the same approaches that it has nearly uninterrupted for three decades.

Tamir Hayman analyzes the latest reports about an offer by Hamas to release three female soldiers in exchange for 150 captured terrorists, of whom 90 have received life sentences; then, if that exchange happens successfully, a second stage of the deal will begin.

If this does happen, Israel will release all the serious prisoners who had been sentenced to life and who are associated with Hamas, which will leave Israel without any bargaining chips for the second stage. In practice, Israel will release everyone who is important to Hamas without getting back all the hostages. In this situation, it’s evident that Israel will approach the second stage of the negotiations in the most unfavorable way possible. Hamas will achieve all its demands in the first stage, except for a commitment from Israel to end the war completely.

How does this relate to the fighting in Rafah? Hayman explains:

In the absence of an agreement or compromise by Hamas, it is detrimental for Israel to continue the static situation we were in. It is positive that new energy has entered the campaign. . . . The [capture of the] border of the Gaza Strip and the Rafah crossing are extremely important achievements, while the ongoing dismantling of the battalions is of secondary importance.

That being said, Hayman is critical of the approach to negotiations taken so far:

Gradual hostage trades don’t work. We must adopt a different concept of a single deal in which Israel offers a complete cessation of the war in exchange for all the hostages.