Can Israel reach a cease-fire agreement with Hamas now that Yahya Sinwar has reached room temperature? Or has nothing much changed except the scorecard?

Negotiators will soon find out. In what seems like a surprise, Benjamin Netanyahu bucked his right-wing allies in the Cabinet and authorized Mossad chief David Barnea to return to Qatar for renewed talks. Hamas negotiators have traveled to Cairo for indirect engagement on ending the war Hamas started in Gaza over a year ago, but ...

Mossad chief David Barnea will travel to Doha on Sunday to try to restart discussions on a deal to release Israeli hostages held in Gaza and halt the war between Israel and Palestinian terror group Hamas, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said in a statement Thursday evening.

Meanwhile, an Egyptian security delegation met with a delegation of Hamas leaders in Cairo as part of the same efforts, Egypt’s state-affiliated Al Qahera News TV said, citing an unnamed official source.

Netanyahu’s office also put out a statement saying he welcomed Egypt’s willingness to advance a deal.

The move only surprises because Netanyahu just made Hamas operatives a Corleone-esque offer they can't refuse. Return the hostages, Netanyahu promised, and we'll spare your lives and send you somewhere safe. Failure to do so, Netanyahu also promised, meant sure death and utter destruction. Either Netanyahu isn't getting any applications for amnesty by hostage holders, or the political pressure to restart post-Sinwar negotiations got too strong. 

One can certainly understand why the hostage families see Sinwar's death as an opening to at least be explored:

Families of the 101 hostages held by Hamas in Gaza urged Netanyahu to give Israel’s negotiators a wide mandate to secure a deal for their return. “The hostages’ families call on the public to support their unified appeal to the prime minister: grant the negotiating team broad authority at the Doha summit to secure a deal for returning all hostages,” the Hostages Families Forum said in a statement.

Fair enough, but it seems pretty unrealistic. Hamas has already re-upped the same demands Sinwar made before meeting an IDF drone, followed by IDF ordnance. They want Israel to withdraw from Gaza first before setting terms on a hostages-for-prisoners swap. But Netanyahu can certainly make an effort, and if Hamas refuses to change its position -- or even stick to demands it has already made -- then that leaves Netanyahu no worse in position, and arguably strengthened.

In the meantime, though, it's still game on. And at least Antony Blinken is asking the correct question:

Israeli and American negotiators are scheduled to return to Qatar over the weekend in an effort to revive cease-fire talks between Israel and Hamas, the Israeli prime minister’s office said on Thursday.

But the announcement came amid new Israeli bombardment both in the Gaza Strip and in Lebanon on Thursday, and uncertainty from U.S. and Qatari officials about whether Hamas might soon rejoin the talks.

“We haven’t yet really determined whether Hamas is prepared to engage,” Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said at a news conference in Doha, the Qatari capital. “The fundamental question is: Is Hamas serious?”

Not so far, Blinken and his Qatari counterpart admit:

Mr. Blinken met for an hour with Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, Qatar’s prime minister and foreign minister, discussing how to end the wars in Gaza and Lebanon. Appearing together afterward at the news conference, they said they had no indication that Hamas was more willing to negotiate since Israel killed its leader, Yahya Sinwar, last week.

Meanwhile, the White House may be looking for a scapegoat if they can't get a deal. CNN reports that someone "close" to the Biden administration says Bibi will wait out the moment until he knows who wins the US elections, in part because Donald Trump has already begun discussing Israeli security in the next administration:

“There’s no check on Bibi,” a Democrat close to the White House told CNN. “He knows he has two to three weeks to do whatever he wants.”

Locked in a close race with Harris, Trump has appeared eager to publicly stoke Netanyahu’s ego and tout the two men’s relationship. Trump’s allies also privately played up the Netanyahu-Trump phone calls as demonstrating that Netanyahu is seriously eyeing the possibility of a Trump victory. A Trump adviser argued that “these phone calls demonstrate that the international community sees Trump as the solution instead of Biden.”

“And if Netanyahu didn’t think Trump would win, he wouldn’t call him,” they said.

Biden's team has a yearlong record of failure and betrayal that extends to this moment. After Biden's team leaked the Israeli plans for the retaliation on Iran, why would Netanyahu bother to deal with Blinken, other than just at the level of diplomatic niceties? 

Anyway, don't expect Hamas to suddenly capitulate, and don't expect Israel to do that either. Since that's what both sides demand, this likely will have just as much success as all other Biden-Blinken efforts.