(DCNF)—The Biden administration is increasing demands for a halt to Israeli military operations in Gaza, but Hamas keeps rejecting ceasefire proposals.
President Joe Biden relayed to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a tense phone conversation on Thursday that an “immediate ceasefire” was “essential” in the Gaza Strip — a call shared by his administration and key voting blocs — and urged Netanyahu to reach a deal “without delay.” Israel has made several ceasefire proposals to Hamas and offered generous terms to reach a deal, but the terrorist group has repeatedly rejected the plans since the war began.
Hamas most recently spurned an Israeli ceasefire deal on Tuesday, but said it would review details further; the terrorist group wants assurances that Israel Defense Forces (IDF) forces will begin to withdraw from Gaza fully, that civilians can return to their homes in the north of the region and that a large number of Palestinian prisoners can be released, according to Reuters and The Washington Post. More broadly, Hamas is seeking a long-term ceasefire as part of a deal arrangement with Israel.
“[Hamas] is interested in reaching an agreement that puts an end to the aggression on our people. Despite that, the Israeli position remains intransigent and it didn’t meet any of the demands of our people and our resistance,” Hamas said in response to the ceasefire proposal, according to Reuters.
“The way Hamas uses it is, to quote Sun Zhu, ‘Never interrupt your enemy while they’re making a mistake,’” Noronha told the DCNF. “Israel isn’t making a mistake so much as it is that Hamas has them exactly where they wanted from day one — which was for Israel to defend itself and then lose international political support — and Hamas then believes it is achieving its political goals.”
“[Hamas’] view is that in the interim, they’re getting what they want. And then at some point in the future, they can leverage that international political outcry to get a more favorable ceasefire,” Noronha told the DCNF.
Since Oct. 7, Hamas has rejected six ceasefire proposals, according to The Foundation for Defense of Democracies(FDD). Two offers were turned down in December and January, as the terrorist group wanted a ceasefire first and Israeli withdrawal before any discussion of releasing hostages, according to the WSJ and i24 News.
The Biden administration was optimistic a deal would be reached in February, but this too was shot down, as Hamas stood by its demand for a long-term ceasefire, according to The New York Times. Israel made two separate proposals for a six-week ceasefire again in March and early April, both of which were also rejected by Hamas, according to FDD.
“We are committed to our demands,” Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh said on April 3, according to Reuters.
Hamas has made these demands on several occasions since it attacked Israel on Oct. 7, killing nearly 1,200 people, and has rejected deals that aren’t favorable to their terms, which Netanyahu has previously called “delusional.” Netanyahu has taken a hardline stance against a permanent ceasefire until Israel has achieved “total victory” against Hamas, but has been striving for a temporary truce in exchange for the remainder of the hostages.
There is also an open question as to whether Hamas would hold to the terms of a potential ceasefire deal. A temporary ceasefire was reached in November, in which Israel halted fighting in exchange for a large number of hostages, but it ended a week after Hamas reportedly broke the terms of the deal.
Hamas also broke existing ceasefire arrangements with Israel during its surprise attack against the country on Oct. 7. Hamas and its backer Iran have declared that Israel needs to be eradicated completely.
“Israel is a country that has no place on our land,” Hamas official Ghazi Hamad said in November. “We must teach Israel a lesson, and we will do this again and again. The [Oct. 7 attacks are] just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth.”
The U.S., which has worked with Israel and international negotiators to craft ceasefire proposals since the war began, presented a separate offer to both sides on Sunday, according to The Wall Street Journal. Under this proposal — a six-week truce — Hamas would have to release 40 of the roughly 130 hostages it is holding in Gaza, and Israel would release 900 Palestinian prisoners, 100 of whom are jailed on terrorism charges.
Both sides were still considering the U.S. proposal as of Tuesday, according to the WSJ. “To be honest, we are not optimistic,” an official familiar with the current negotiations told the WSJ.
Biden initially supported Israel’s war efforts, claiming that he would “never fail to have Israel’s back” – his administration rejected calls for a ceasefire because they were concerned it would allow Hamas to rebuild its strength and attack Israel again.
After months of unrest within his own administration and outcry from blocs of the Democratic party, Biden is now insisting on an immediate temporary ceasefire and pressuring Israel to quickly change course on its counteroffensive — or face unspecified consequences.
“If there’s no changes to [Israel’s] policy and their approaches [in Gaza], then there’s going to have to be changes to ours,” White House National Security spokesman John Kirby told reporters on Thursday.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.