Just when we thought we'd seen everything in the past few weeks, the Hamas-Israel war throws us a new curveball -- a pre-emptive rejection of a proposal that doesn't exist yet. 

Israel continues its military operations in Gaza to destroy Hamas, a goal that Benjamin Netanyahu made clear in his address to a joint session of Congress this week. At the same time, however, Netanyahu pledged to continue diplomatic efforts to get the hostages out of Gaza and perhaps find a cease-fire solution that will allow Israel to achieve its goal of eliminating any further threats from the territory.

To that end, Netanyahu and the cabinet had prepared a new proposal for discussion with mediators and negotiators. Israel's own team hadn't seen the terms yet, but Hamas has already rejected it out of hand before knowing its terms:

The Hamas terror group preemptively rejected the terms of an Israeli proposal for a hostage-ceasefire deal on Thursday night, according to Reuters, in what a senior Israeli official called “bizarre” messages, given that “nobody has read [the proposal] yet.”

A senior Israeli official said Hamas had not yet seen the latest proposal, which was expected to go out “in the coming hours.”

“We haven’t sent it yet, nobody has read it yet. Even the negotiators haven’t got it yet. They will read it before transferring it to Hamas for their reaction,” said the official, presumably referring to the Arab intermediaries facilitating the talks.

Supposedly, this is because it's a modification of a previous proposal made jointly by Israel and the US. Haaretz claims that Netanyahu's changing the deal because "he thinks he can improve positions," and that he's "taking an uncalculated risk with the hostages' lives." Perhaps, but Hamas rejected that deal already and repeatedly, which means they want the terms renegotiated anyway. And one way to discourage further efforts to increase asks in negotiations is to make refusals costly. That's not an "uncalculated risk" -- it's basic negotiation tactics, made possible by the IDF's systematic progress in destroying Hamas' fighting capacities.

Could that work? Maybe, although that approach is a calculated risk. But it helps when your ally doesn't publicly put all the onus on you for a lack of progress in a negotiation. And that's precisely what quasi-President Kamala Harris did yesterday after meeting with Netanyahu:

US Vice President Kamala Harris insisted Thursday that she would not be “silent” on suffering in Gaza while also touting her pro-Israel bona fides, in comments made shortly after meeting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Her remarks drew furious Israeli complaints that they could complicate efforts to reach a deal with the Hamas terror group to free hostages and end the war in Gaza.

Speaking to reporters after what she called a “frank and constructive” meeting with Netanyahu at the White House, Harris said it was time to end the “devastating” war sparked by the Hamas terror group’s brutal October 7 attack on Israel, in comments that some saw as a sign of a possible shift in Washington’s stance as the presumptive Democratic nominee for president takes center stage.

“What has happened in Gaza over the past nine months is devastating. The images of dead children and desperate hungry people fleeing for safety, sometimes displaced for the second, third or fourth time,” Harris told reporters. “We cannot look away in the face of these tragedies. We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering and I will not be silent.”

Really? Harris has been remarkably silent on demanding that Hamas accept the deal that Biden himself put on the table in May, a deal that the Israelis backed. In her relatively short statement following the brief interaction with Netanyahu, Harris never once makes any demands from Hamas, not even to release the American hostages it currently holds. Harris never even suggests that Hamas has been the problem in negotiations, let alone the cause of the misery in Gaza by using civilian areas to launch attacks or hijacking the aid that Israel sends into Gaza. 

Harris does talk about the deal Biden put on the table, but fails to mention that Hamas has repeatedly rejected it. Instead, she demands Netanyahu make changed because "it's time to get this deal done."

And according to Axios, Harris didn't even have the guts to say it to Netanyahu's face. Her statement demanding action from Israel blindsided the Israelis:

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was upset by Vice President Kamala Harris' on-camera statement after their meeting and is concerned it will harm the negotiations over a Gaza hostage and ceasefire deal, an Israeli official said in a briefing with reporters. ....

Two Israeli officials said Netanyahu's meeting with Biden was much more constructive than his meeting with Harris, but stressed the meeting with the vice president wasn't tense or difficult.

• The Israeli officials said Netanyahu and his team were caught off guard by Harris' on-camera statement and taken aback by its tone, which they said sounded much more critical than Biden's.
• "Harris' statement after the meeting was much more critical than what she told Netanyahu in the meeting," one Israeli official claimed.

At the time, officials in Israel suggested that Harris' remarks could screw up negotiations, both in the mediation with Hamas and within the region:

A top Israeli official briefing reporters anonymously argued that Jerusalem had been uncomfortable with Harris’s tone throughout her remarks and accused her of overly stressing the importance of ending the war in a manner that appeared to show gaps between the positions of the US and Israel.

“Hopefully the remarks Harris made in her press conference won’t be interpreted by Hamas as daylight between the US and Israel, thereby making a deal harder to secure,” the senior official said. ...

“The more the gap widens between our countries, the more we move away from a deal and thus also increase the possibility of a regional escalation,” said the senior official.

That's what happens when an incompetent novice gets involved in foreign affairs. We already had an incompetence problem with Joe Biden in dealing with this conflict, and now we're seeing the outcome of having a radical incompetence contributing to the mess.