Finally, US President Donald Trump has seen the Gaza peace plan through in its first stage —the ceasefire, release of hostages and UN humanitarian aid. Hostage diplomacy thrives in the shadows, where after using the back-channels you can deny they were ever put to use and the optics of compassion mask deeper calculations, writes our London correspondent Shyam Bhatia in the Op-Ed piece From Beirut to Gaza, compassion as currency . Unless governments find collective mechanisms — perhaps through the UN or regional security pacts — to delegitimise bargains through hostage diplomacy, after each set of new releases, they would live under the fear of next batch of captures, he stresses. The hostage releases on both sides has brought brief relief and international applause but behind every

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