Benny Avni examines the terms of the Israel-Hizballah cease-fire proposal:

In essence, the pact is a return to an arrangement dictated by a UN Security Council resolution, 1701, reached in the aftermath of the 2006 Hizballah war on Israel. An earlier council resolution, 1559, also ordered all Lebanese militias to disarm. Now, America and France are guaranteeing implementation.

Over the years Hizballah became a stronger military force than Lebanon’s national army. Its Radwan Force became entrenched in the south, dug tunnels into Israel, and planned to capture the Galilee. For months, the IDF has been decimating the Hizballah leadership and arsenal. It also captured a five-mile belt inside Lebanon, destroying Hizballah’s tunnels and observation towers, and disbanding Radwan.

Prime Minister Netanyahu will lobby his cabinet partners to vote for the deal. The more complex task he faces, though, will be to convince residents of northern Israel that the pact would guarantee they could return home safely. More than 60,000 Galilee residents have been dislocated and have been living in hotels further south since October 8, 2023. Creating conditions for their return has been the government’s declared goal.

“Anyone saying that the war’s aims were achieved is mistaken,” Mayor David Azulay of Israel’s northernmost town, Metula, told [Israel’s] Channel 12 News. “I’ll advise Metula residents not to return. Let them stay in Tel Aviv, or wherever.”

Addressing a recent meeting of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Central Committee, Mahmoud Abbas criticized Hamas more sharply than he has previously (at least in public), calling them “sons of dogs.” The eighty-nine-year-old Palestinian Authority president urged the terrorist group to “stop the war of extermination in Gaza” and “hand over the American hostages.” The editors of the New York Sun comment:

Mr. Abbas has long been at odds with Hamas, which violently ousted his Fatah party from Gaza in 2007. The tone of today’s outburst, though, is new. Comparing rivals to canines, which Arabs consider dirty, is startling. Its motivation, though, was unrelated to the plight of the 59 remaining hostages, including 23 living ones. Instead, it was an attempt to use an opportune moment for reviving Abbas’s receding clout.

[W]hile Hamas’s popularity among Palestinians soared after its orgy of killing on October 7, 2023, it is now sinking. The terrorists are hoarding Gaza aid caches that Israel declines to replenish. As the war drags on, anti-Hamas protests rage across the Strip. Polls show that Hamas’s previously elevated support among West Bank Arabs is also down. Striking the iron while it’s hot, Abbas apparently longs to retake center stage. Can he?

Diminishing support for Hamas is yet to match the contempt Arabs feel toward Abbas himself. Hamas considers him irrelevant for what it calls “the resistance.”

[Meanwhile], Abbas is yet to condemn Hamas’s October 7 massacre. His recent announcement of ending alms for terror is a ruse.

Abbas, it’s worth noting, hasn’t saved all his epithets for Hamas. He also twice said of the Americans, “may their fathers be cursed.” Of course, after a long career of anti-Semitic incitement, Abbas can’t be expected to have a moral awakening. Nor is there much incentive for him to fake one. But, like the protests in Gaza, Abbas’s recent diatribe is a sign that Hamas is perceived as weak and that its stock is sinking.