By then, I don’t think that the use of earth’s orbital period around the sun would make sense as a unit of measurement. It is important to track the seasons if you’re living in an agricultural society. But the orbital period of the earth is not consistent across time, nor the time it takes for the earth to rotate. It doesn’t make a good unit of measurement. And don’t get me started on leap years, leap seconds, negative leap seconds, timezones and daylight saving times…

I’d prefer to base the new unit of time based on “Plank time”. About 10^44 of these are about one second. Now if we switch to the duodecimal system we can define 12^41 × Plank time to be our standard unit. It’s about a third of an earth second. 144 of these (12^43) equal roughly 3/4 of a minute. 144 of these (12^45) is about 1.8 hours. 12 of these (12^46) could be the equivalent of a day, 12 of that could be an equivalent of a week, and you can find an equivalent for a year. The duodecimal is unnecessary, but it makes division a bit neater. Now peak a date well before the beginning of human history to avoid the need for negative years (BC / AD) and that’s it.

That way you get a single number that you can manipulate arithmetically. Not like yyyy/mm/dd format where each part is a different length.

This proves nothing. Of course there would be people who wish for any deal regardless of the conditions and it is not surprising that they will confront the government about it.

Israel cares a whole lot about its hostages. Evidence for that are the prices they were willing to pay in the past.

But sure, let’s go with your logic. Why can’t Israel just go carpet-bombing the crowded part in the south of the Gaza strip that all the refugees fled to? It would be a very effective way to eradicate them all. They are so crowded in such a small area that it’s possible to kill a couple hundred thousands in a single day. Wow, Israel has a lot to learn on how to ethnically cleanse a region.

This is simply not true.

There were talks about up to 15 hostages, of 239 in demand for 4 days of ceasefire. Hamas needs this ceasefire desperately to regroup and assess the damages. The chaos now serves Israel well and apparently it puts much more pressure on Hamas. The ground invasion proves very effective. Maybe as Hamas becomes more desperate the “price” for the hostages will drop. Alternatively, if Israel will allow them to regroup, the war will take significantly more time because it will be much harder to eradicate them. Maybe the Israelis know where the hostages are held and after a ceasefire the hostages will be transferred to a different hideout, or smuggled via the tunnels to Egypt and from there to who knows where.