For Hamas, saving face by saying ‘no’ to ceasefires | The Times of Israel   ‘The group and its supporters in Gaza say they see little use in a humanitarian truce that doesn’t result in ‘honoring’ its fighters with larger concessions’

This has often been the case in almost every war and major combat fought by human beings throughout the ages. Our capacity to end such battles is never a match for our ability to enter into them in the first place.

And yet, after acquiring so vast an amount of experience in the art of conflict, why must we remain virtual novices in the tricky task of finding an exit strategy from campaigns that have gone on for far too long and hostilities lasting well beyond the generations that have started them?

Can there ever be a time when all such contention comes with a mandatory expiry date, a turn-off signal embedded in their DNA, a command instructing them to wind down and finally cease before too much harm is done and serious damage to life and limb has occurred?

A facility like this would make a welcome addition to those few and feeble strategies that today exist for the purposes of bringing warfare to an end.

And could so desirable a construct be retrofitted to a very present crisis that has endured for decades and still shows no sign of flagging or making itself ready for some mutually agreed stage of termination?

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