Middle East Crisis: C.I.A. Chief Joins Cairo Talks in Push for Cease-Fire Deal

And Egypt, which shares a border with Gaza, has said keeping Israeli troops there could raise national security concerns and potentially threaten Egyptian-Israeli relations. Egypt also says it has already taken aggressive action to destroy tunnels and stop smuggling.

Faced with an apparent impasse, diplomats have tried to push toward some kind of agreement, veering for weeks between tentative optimism and deadlock and saying little about the talks in public. Both Israeli and Hamas officials have blamed each other for the failure to reach a deal, which also aims to free the more than 100 hostages held in Gaza.

On Thursday, Israeli security chiefs traveled briefly to Cairo to continue talks with Egyptian mediators. American officials, including the C.I.A. director William J. Burns, and President Biden’s Middle East envoy, Brett McGurk, also participated, the White House said Friday.

“The process is moving forward,” John F. Kirby, a White House national security spokesman, told reporters on Friday. “It’s moving forward in the way we had outlined earlier.”

The talks came after Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken visited Israel, Egypt and Qatar this week to push for an American proposal intended to bridge some of the differences between Israel and Hamas over a cease-fire deal. Mr. Blinken declared that Israel had accepted the plan, the details of which have not been made public, and that it was now up to Hamas to accept the deal.

But Hamas has rejected that characterization and officials on both sides said the proposal left major issues unclear.

At the meeting, David Barnea, the head of the Mossad intelligence agency, presented new maps showing the possible redeployment of Israeli forces along the Philadelphi Corridor, according to two Israeli officials familiar with the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to speak publicly. They did not provide further details on the proposal.

Egyptian officials have not commented publicly on the meeting, but Egypt’s position on the corridor has been clear: It has consistently said that the longstanding agreement governing the area commits Israel to keeping troops away from it.

Israel and Hamas have been negotiating for months on the basis of a three-stage cease-fire framework endorsed by Mr. Biden and the United Nations Security Council. The agreement stipulates an initial truce — during which hostages would be swapped for Palestinians jailed in Israel — that would lead to a permanent cease-fire.

U.S., Egyptian and Qatari mediators are urgently pushing for a deal now in the hope that it will help avert a wider regional conflict after the assassination last month of Hamas’s political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran, and an Israeli airstrike that killed a senior commander in Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Lebanese group. Iran and its allies have vowed to retaliate against Israel for both killings.

But numerous issues remain unresolved in the Gaza talks, dampening prospects for a breakthrough, according to Israeli and Hamas officials. They include how many and which Palestinian prisoners would be released, as well as Mr. Netanyahu’s condition that displaced Palestinians returning to northern Gaza be searched for weapons.

The uncertainty hanging over the talks has further anguished the families of those held hostage in Gaza. On Friday, several freed hostages and their relatives met with Mr. Netanyahu to plead for an agreement.

Ella Ben Ami, whose parents were both abducted during the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7, said they had asked Mr. Netanyahu to do everything in his power to reach a deal. Her mother, Raz, was freed in November; her father, Ohad, remains in Gaza.

“We understand that this is likely the last opportunity before we enter a wider war, and we want to see the hostages, our loved ones at home,” Ms. Ben Ami told reporters.

“Personally, I left with a heavy and difficult feeling that this isn’t going to happen soon,” she added. “I fear for my father’s life.”

Vivian Yee and Emad Mekay contributed reporting from Cairo, Johnatan Reiss from Tel Aviv and Eric Schmitt from Washington.

One of the attackers shot and killed Rasheed al-Seda, 23, who had joined a group of residents trying to defend the village, armed with little more than stones, according to residents and Palestinian health officials. Settlers also set fire to four houses and six vehicles, according to Yesh Din, an Israeli rights group.

The Israeli military said that its forces, along with Israeli Border Police, were dispatched to the village and dispersed the rioters by firing shots into the air and “removing the Israeli civilians from the town.” The military said the attack was quelled within 30 minutes, but Jit residents said that the soldiers and police did not arrive until more than an hour after the rampage had begun.

Israeli rights activists say that the Israeli military generally avoids confronting violent settlers as a matter of policy, and soldiers routinely enable settler violence against Palestinians and their property, sometimes watching from the sidelines.

But the attack on Jit prompted a stronger response from the government, drawing unusually swift condemnation from top officials. Israel has been under pressure from the United States, the European Union and other Western allies to stop settler violence.

Shai Parnes, a spokesman for B’tselem, an Israeli rights organization focused on the West Bank, said the government’s decision to use administrative detention for the three settlers owes something to the international condemnation of the events in Jit.

“When international outrage necessitates a response, Israel chooses the most draconian measure,” he saidn. “That won’t change the basic reality of state-sponsored settler violence that blights the lives of Palestinians.”

Israel’s extensive use of administrative detention — almost entirely against Palestinians — has been widely criticized as a violation of international law. Legal experts say it effectively suspends due process. Israel has defended it as a necessary tool to detain those it says pose an imminent threat to national security.

The Israeli military said that it had opened an investigation into the rampage but there is widespread skepticism among rights groups and Palestinians that it will result in people being held accountable for the violence. In the few cases in which investigations into settler attacks have been opened, indictments have rarely filed, rights groups said.

When asked about the status of the investigation, the military referred questions to the police. The Israeli police referred questions back to the military.

Even though the warrants for the three suspects are for four to six months of administrative detention, it is not certain that they will serve all six months or be indicted. Administrative detention can also be extended after the six months.

A New York Times investigation into impunity for violent factions within the Israeli settler movement found that Jewish Israelis involved in terrorist attacks against Palestinians have received substantial leniency, including reduced prison time, anemic investigations and pardons. Most incidents of settler violence — including setting fire to vehicles and cutting down olive groves — fall under the jurisdiction of the police, who tend to ignore them.

More than 2.7 million Palestinians reside in ancestral cities, towns and farming villages in the West Bank, where, for generations, many have lived from farming and shepherding. But that way of life is increasingly under threat as more Israeli settlers — now numbering nearly 500,000 — move to the territory to live in settlements considered illegal under international law.

Since the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack on Israel and the start of the war in Gaza, attacks by Jewish settlers on Palestinians across the West Bank have become common. There have been about 1,250 such attacks since the war began, according to the United Nations.

More than 589 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces or Jewish settlers in the West Bank since the start of the war in Gaza, according to Palestinian health officials. Eighteen Israelis have also been killed in the territory in the same time period, according to the United Nations.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement last week that he takes the Jit riot seriously.

But residents of Jit said top officials in Mr. Netanyahu’s government, notably Itamar Ben-Gvir, the far-right minister of national security, bore responsibility for the attack because of their inflammatory rhetoric. Mr. Ben-Gvir also made a decision to arm Israeli settlers with assault rifles in the wake of the Oct. 7 attack.

On Friday, Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant harshly criticized Mr. Ben-Gvir on social media after the head of the country’s internal security service, Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar, reportedly accused Mr. Ben-Gvir in a letter of encouraging Jewish extremists and helping cause “indescribable damage” to Israel.

Mr. Gallant accused Mr. Ben-Gvir of “reckless actions that endanger Israel’s national security and create internal division in the nation.”

Aaron Boxerman and Johnatan Reiss contributed reporting.

Jonathan Dekel-Chen — the father of Sagui Dekel-Chen, a hostage in Gaza and a member of Kibbutz Nir Oz — said on Thursday that members of his kibbutz were “appalled by the idea of this government creating a ceremony that would distract from their culpability.”

He accused the government of paying “lip service” to the demands of hostage families for a cease-fire deal to bring their relatives home, and he noted that 30 members of his community remained in captivity and that four others were among the six bodies of hostages the Israeli military said it had recovered this week.

Of the roughly 250 people the Israeli authorities say were taken hostage on Oct. 7, more than 100 remain in Gaza. Roughly a third of the remaining captives are believed to be dead.

Kibbutz Kfar Aza, a few miles east of Gaza, said in a statement on Tuesday that the Israeli government should focus on rescuing the hostages, rather than organizing events. The kibbutz said it would commemorate Oct. 7 privately.

Michal Paikin, a spokeswoman for Kibbutz Be’eri, said in a statement shared with The New York Times that her community opposed “the Israeli government’s preoccupation with producing a national memorial ceremony.” The statement called for an independent state commission to investigate the Oct. 7 attack and what it described as the government’s failure to prevent it.

Ms. Regev, the minister charged with planning the ceremony, dismissed criticism at a news conference on Thursday and said the memorial ceremony would be filmed in advance without an audience. She posted video clips on social media showing her chiding reporters at the briefing, lamenting the criticism she had faced in recent days, and explaining that she was attempting to maintain national unity.

In response, the Hostages and Missing Families Forum posted a statement to social media, accusing Ms. Regev and the government of planning a ceremony without an audience because they were afraid of looking them and other victims of the Oct. 7 attack in the eye.

Isaac Herzog, Israel’s president, in a letter to Mr. Netanyahu reported by Israeli news media on Friday, offered to host a governmental ceremony with no political symbols as an alternative to Ms. Regev’s event and in an effort to quell the backlash. Mr. Herzog’s role is mostly symbolic, serving as a national unifier in a fractious parliamentary democracy where the prime minister wields the most power. Mr. Netanyahu’s office declined to comment on the proposal.

“We recognize Israel’s right to defend itself from terrorism and other security threats, consistent with international humanitarian law,” a State Department statement said. “We will continue to do what is necessary to ensure Israel can defend itself in the face of these threats.”

U.S. officials said the White House considered a number of factors — including daily developments in Gaza, last month’s visit to Washington by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and concerns about retaliation by Iran and its proxies, especially after the assassinations of senior Hamas and Hezbollah leaders — in deciding when to formally approve the sales. The timing of the announcement also intended in part to avoid an ugly fight in Congress at a time when the Biden administration is trying to broker a cease-fire. Congress is not in session this month, and a 15-day clock for lawmakers to try to block the sales runs out next week.

Bradley Bowman, a former U.S. Army officer and senior military expert at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington research group, said the White House is calculating that the announcement of the arms sales could have an immediate deterrent effect.

“We are sending extraordinary combat power to the region to deter a wider regional war, and we are saying we will be delivering vital capabilities to Israel for years to come,” Mr. Bowman said. “That’s an important message from the world’s leading military power as Israel confronts extraordinary threats.”

The war in Gaza — and how it has divided the American public — has put a spotlight on the normally lengthy, technical process by which U.S. weapons producers sell arms to foreign governments.

Here is a look at the arms sales that the Biden administration notified Congress on Aug. 13 that it has approved.

F-15 fighter jets

Up to 50 new F-15 IA jets, and upgrade kits for the 25 F-15 I aircraft that Israel already has, are at the core of the $18.8 billion purchase that Congress was first informally notified about in January. The deal was initially delayed by the top Democrats on the House and Senate foreign affairs committees amid concerns about Israel’s tactics in Gaza, but they agreed in June to let it move forward.

The package with Boeing Corp. also covers an array of equipment for the jets — including 120 engines, 75 radars, 320 missile launchers and 180 GPS devices, among other technology. None of it is expected to be delivered until 2029.

The F-15s will help Israel “meet current and future enemy threats, strengthen its homeland defense and serve as a deterrent to regional threats,” the Defense Security Cooperation Agency said in its announcement of the approval.

Tank ammunition

Israel plans to buy 32,739 tank cartridges of 120-millimeter rounds from military contractors General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman for an estimated $774.1 million. The sale would also include various tank munitions, canisters and support services, with deliveries beginning in 2027.

The informal notification of the proposed sale was sent to Congress in May, according to reports in The Wall Street Journal and CNN. It was part of initial discussions between Congress and the State Department to also sell tactical vehicles and mortar rounds to Israel, in an arms package totaling $1 billion. The final notification for the vehicles and mortars was also sent to Congress on Aug. 13.

Tactical vehicles

The sale of eight-ton cargo trucks is valued at $583 million. The trucks, which would be delivered starting in 2026, are used for freight transport, unit resupply and other tactical missions to support combat units.

The notification does not specify how many of the trucks Israel plans to buy from the manufacturer, the Oshkosh Corp., but says the total sale would include an earlier, $62.4 million order for the trucks, spare parts, software delivery and other support.

Mortar rounds

Israel plans to buy 50,400 120-millimeter high-explosive cartridges for mortars, a kind of portable cannon. The sale, totaling $61 million, includes 400 rounds from an earlier proposed sale from General Dynamic Ordnance. They will be delivered starting in 2026.

Medium-range missiles

The U.S. has approved the sale of 30 medium-range, air-to-air missiles from the AIM-120 C-8 series. The missiles are considered “a key aerial combat capability used to defend against airborne threats, such as the missile and drone salvo launched at Israel on April 14,” according to a statement from the Defense Security Cooperation Agency.

The notification did not say when the missiles would be delivered to Israel, and a U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak on the record said it is possible that some could be sent in the next year, based on production capacity. They are being sold to Israel by RTX Corp. for $102.5 million.

The AIM-120 C-8 series, known as an “AMRAAM” are used by militaries around the world. In Ukraine, AMRAAMs are expected to arm the fleet of F-16 fighter jets that European governments are sending to help Kyiv defend its country from Russia.

— Lara Jakes Lara Jakes writes about weapons and global conflicts.