After having announced their support for key elements of U.S. President Donald Trump’s Sept. 29 twenty-point peace plan for Gaza, top leaders of Hamas specified on Oct. 4 that they were prepared to start negotiations immediately to arrange for returning all the hostages, stopping Israel’s destruction of Gaza, and bringing immediate humanitarian aid to the desperate population with the help of the United Nations. They added that they were also willing to disarm and hand their weapons over to a duly constituted Palestinian authority, but they specified that such a new authority could not include foreigners (such as the despised Tony Blair) and that “attempts to exclude Hamas from the Palestinian political process will not succeed.”
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas also welcomed the Hamas and Trump statements, urging that there be a complete ceasefire, immediate humanitarian aid, “and the commencement of the reconstruction process.” Regional leaders are increasingly aware that the urgent need for such a reconstruction process is best filled by LaRouche’s Oasis Plan.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated that he would act to implement “the first stage of Trump’s plan for the immediate release of all hostages,” and purportedly ordered the IDF to halt its campaign to conquer Gaza and only engage in “defensive” operations—which nonetheless led to another 57 Gazans being killed in the course of one day.
But it is not only the Gaza situation that continues to hang by a thin thread; the entire global strategic situation remains at razor’s edge. Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche prepared a leaflet which was widely circulated on Oct. 3 at Germany Unity Day rallies in Berlin and Stuttgart, which says in part:
“Just a few more steps in the escalation, and we could end up in an irreversible catastrophe—a global nuclear war that destroys all life on Earth. In many places throughout the world, we see the international legal order disintegrating and trust between states disappearing. Military strikes are carried out even as diplomatic negotiations are underway, such as the Israeli and U.S. attack on Iran or Israel’s air strike against Qatar.
“Nations of the Global South have lost all the trust they had in the West because we have stood by for 22 months and watched the horror unfold in Gaza, which the UN has now officially classified as genocide. The repeated Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian military airfields in the hinterland and on the Engels and Dyagilevo air bases were attacks on a pillar of Russia’s nuclear triad, its airborne nuclear deterrent. As a result, Russian military leaders have had to assume that the West is planning a decapitation strike against Russia. Now, President Trump’s special advisor on Ukraine Keith Kellogg is bringing into play the delivery of Tomahawk cruise missiles to Ukraine, which, with a range of more than 1,000 kilometers, could hit targets deep inside Russian territory….
“The real reason is that the West’s attempt to establish a unipolar world order after the end of the Cold War has backfired. The formerly colonized countries of the Global South are no longer willing to submit to the dictates of Western hegemony because China’s historically unprecedented rise gives them, for the first time, the chance to take charge of their own economic development through cooperation with the New Silk Road.
“Today, the countries of the Global South are cooperating with each other to build a new economic system that will enable them to develop on their own terms. If we in the West were not so arrogant, we would be delighted that the global majority is finally overcoming the 500-year period of colonialism.
“We have reached a crucial turning point in history. We can either continue the geopolitical confrontation with Russia and China and risk a third—this time final—world war, or we can decide to cooperate with the newly emerging economic system. For the first time in human history, we are all in the same boat: We will either go down together or jointly open a new, more humane chapter in universal history.”
