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The Biden administration is again putting its diplomatic heft behind an effort to dislodge months of stalled negotiations between Israel and Hamas to end the 10-month-long war in Gaza, and voicing optimism over the potential for a breakthrough.
Israeli and Hamas officials are striking a far different tone. Both sides have poured cold water on the idea that a deal could be imminent, saying that mediators’ efforts — and the latest American proposal aimed at bridging gaps between the two sides — have failed to resolve some of the most substantive disputes in the talks.
On Monday, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, making his ninth visit to Israel since the war began, emerged from a three-hour-long meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and announced that the Israeli leader had assented to the new U.S. “bridging proposal,” introduced at talks in Qatar last week.
But Israeli and Hamas officials familiar with the talks said the U.S. plan left major disagreements mostly unresolved. Hamas quickly dismissed the American-led framework as conforming to Mr. Netanyahu’s conditions, which he has stiffened in recent weeks. And on Tuesday, Mr. Netanyahu showed little sign of being ready to compromise, repeating his message that Israel would do everything to “preserve our strategic security assets” and “will continue to fight until total victory is achieved over Hamas.”
On Tuesday, as Mr. Blinken traveled to Egypt and Qatar to continue pushing for an agreement, Hamas issued a statement criticizing “misleading claims” by the Biden administration about the talks. It said the latest American proposal amounted to “a reversal” of a framework that Hamas had presented in early July and that U.S. officials repeatedly called a breakthrough.
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The negotiations have taken on renewed urgency following the assassinations of Hamas’s political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran and Fuad Shukr, a senior Hezbollah commander, in Beirut in late July. Diplomats hoped that a cease-fire in Gaza, or even the prospect of one, might persuade Iran and Hezbollah to hold off or blunt their reprisals.
Under the new U.S. proposal, Israeli troops would be able to continue to patrol part of the Gazan border with Egypt, albeit in reduced numbers — one of Mr. Netanyahu’s core demands, according to four officials familiar with the talks, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
That is likely a non-starter for Hamas, which has consistently called for a complete Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. Egypt has also voiced staunch objections to a long-term Israeli presence in that area, known as the Philadelphi Corridor.
Cairo has maintained that it will not accept Israeli troops remaining in the Philadelphi Corridor, which Egyptian officials say would pose national security concerns and would likely anger the Egyptian public.
In a sign of Egypt’s frustrations, state-controlled media outlets, which serve as government mouthpieces, have escalated their language against Israel in recent days, accusing it of trying to pick a fight with Egypt over the corridor to delay progress on a cease-fire in Gaza.
“Netanyahu doesn’t want a cease-fire. So he is creating an artificial problem with Egypt,” a former general, Samir Farag, said on one talk show that aired Monday night.
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During the cease-fire talks that ended last Friday, U.S. officials also asked to delay in-depth conversations over Israel’s demand to screen displaced Palestinians returning to northern Gaza for weapons, another key stumbling block, according to two officials familiar with the talks.
Over the past several months, U.S. officials have repeatedly sought to drum up momentum in the negotiations mediated by Egypt and Qatar. In May, President Biden endorsed an Israeli-backed cease-fire proposal, saying both sides had reached a “decisive moment.” The talks crept along for months until the Hamas counterproposal in July, and then stalled.
The talks now appear to be at risk of reaching yet another dead end.
The United States, alongside Egypt and Qatar, have called for another summit in Cairo before the end of the week. Two Israeli officials, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, said that a date for the meeting had yet to be set and that it was unclear where it might be held. Hamas did not participate in the last round of talks, and it has not said whether it will agree to join this time.
Isabel Kershner contributed reporting from Jerusalem, and Vivian Yee and Emad Mekay from Cairo.
Key Developments
Israel’s military struck a school building in Gaza City on Tuesday, targeting what it said was a Hamas command and control center. The Palestinian Civil Defense emergency services said that 12 people, including women and children, had been killed in the attack, which hit the Mustafa Khaft school. The Israeli military did not say whether the strike had caused casualties. In recent weeks, Israel has launched dozens of strikes at school buildings, which are being used as shelters by tens of thousands of displaced in Gaza, drawing sharp criticism from the United Nations and others. The Israeli military says that Hamas has “cynically exploited” schools, hospitals and shelters as bases and civilians as human shields.
The Gazan Health Ministry said Tuesday that it was still waiting to receive polio vaccines as the risk of an outbreak grows in the territory. After Gaza recorded its first polio case in years, aid groups made plans to vaccinate over 600,000 children in Gaza. The World Health Organization and UNICEF have called for a cease-fire of at least seven days so they can carry out a mass vaccination campaign. It was not immediately clear when the vaccines would arrive. On Sunday, COGAT, the Israeli agency that supervises aid deliveries to Gaza, had said that vaccines to inoculate more than a million children would arrive “in the coming weeks.”
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Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, continuing his diplomatic tour of the Middle East, was in Egypt on Tuesday to push for a cease-fire in Israel’s war with Hamas.
In Egypt, and then in Qatar, Mr. Blinken would be pressing Hamas leadership through intermediaries to continue talks on a deal to secure a truce and free the remaining hostages in Gaza, a senior administration official said.
Negotiations were expected to resume in Egypt this week, after two days of high-level talks in Qatar ended on Friday without an immediate breakthrough. On Monday, Mr. Blinken discussed the deal with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel in Jerusalem.
In Egypt, Mr. Blinken met with President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt at his summer palace in El Alamein, and with the foreign minister, Badr Abdelatty. Later in the day he was heading to Doha, Qatar, to hold talks with Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani, the country’s emir.
Mr. Blinken “thanked the president for Egypt’s partnership as a mediator on the cease-fire talks,” according to a brief statement by State Department spokesman Vedant Patel.
Mr. el-Sisi’s office said in a statement that the Egyptian leader had been “keen to stress that the time has come to end the ongoing war” and shared Mr. Blinken’s concerns for the potential for violence to spread in the region. Mr. el-Sisi insisted that any cease-fire proposal would need to be followed by a “broader international recognition of the Palestinian state and the implementation of the two-state solution.”
On Monday, Mr. Blinken said Mr. Netanyahu had accepted a Biden administration proposal to bridge some remaining differences with Hamas in order to advance a deal, although Israeli and Hamas officials have expressed skepticism that a breakthrough was near. During meetings with the Israelis, Mr. Blinken emphasized that this was “maybe the last opportunity” to secure a cease-fire agreement.
After the talks in Doha last week, Hamas officials characterized the proposal as being too favorable toward Israel. Details of the proposal have not been made public.
Osama Hamdan, a Hamas official, said in a televised interview on Monday that Hamas had broadly accepted a framework for a cease-fire outlined by President Biden in late May. But he accused Mr. Netanyahu of introducing new conditions to that proposal and said Israeli officials had conceded nothing on key issues in the talks last week.
“We believe that the Americans are solely trying to buy time to allow the genocide to continue,” Mr. Hamdan said on Al Jazeera, the pan-Arab news network. “If the U.S. administration was serious, we wouldn’t need more negotiations — only to implement Biden’s proposal.”
The negotiations for a cease-fire took on renewed urgency after the killings of senior leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah in July. An explosion in Tehran, widely attributed to Israel, killed Hamas’s political leader, Ismail Haniyeh. Hours earlier, an Israeli airstrike in the southern suburbs of Beirut killed Fuad Shukr, a senior commander of Hezbollah, which like Hamas, is backed by Iran.
Iran and Hezbollah have vowed to retaliate for the killings, and Israel has said it would respond powerfully to any attack on its territory, raising the specter of an escalating regional conflict.
Speaking to reporters after his address at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, President Biden said his administration was working nonstop to broker a deal, and that while Hamas seemed to be backing away, he thought a deal was “still in play.”
Michael Levenson contributed reporting.
— Robert Jimison traveling with Secretary Blinken in Al Alamein, Egypt
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Israeli forces recovered the bodies of six Israeli hostages from southern Gaza in an overnight operation, the Israeli military said on Tuesday, highlighting the plight of the scores of captives remaining in the Palestinian enclave.
The military named the hostages whose bodies were returned to Israel as Yagev Buchshtab, Alexander Dancyg, Avraham Munder, Yoram Metzger, Nadav Popplewell and Haim Peri. All but Mr. Munder were already known to have lost their lives in captivity.
They were among about 250 people taken hostage last Oct. 7, when Hamas-led militants crossed into Israel from Gaza and carried out attacks that killed about 1,200 people, according to Israeli authorities.
Israeli forces have so far rescued only seven hostages alive. Scores more, mostly women and children, were returned to Israel during a weeklong cease-fire last November. More than 100 captives still remain in Gaza, at least 30 of whom are believed to be dead.
Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, said that the six bodies had been retrieved from Hamas tunnels beneath the city of Khan Younis in a “complex operation.”
The circumstances of the deaths of the six hostages were not immediately clear. A spokesman for Hamas’s military wing, Abu Ubaida, said in March that Mr. Metzger and Mr. Peri were among seven hostages who had been killed in Israeli airstrikes in Gaza. Hamas then said in May that Mr. Popplewell had died from injuries sustained in an Israeli airstrike more than a month before.
Weeks later, the Israeli military said that it was examining the possibility that the three hostages had been killed while Israeli forces were operating in the Khan Younis area.
The retrieval of the bodies came as Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken continued a diplomatic push in the region for a cease-fire deal that would see hostages released in exchange for Palestinian prisoners held in Israel. Frustration has grown in Israel over the months of halting negotiations, and family members of the hostages still in Gaza have led regular protests demanding a deal to secure their freedom.
Mati Dancyg, Alex Dancyg’s son, said he believed there had been opportunities to get his father out of Gaza alive. He accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of putting political considerations first because key members of his governing coalition oppose a cease-fire deal, considering it a surrender to Hamas.
“It is absolutely clear to me that it was possible to bring him back home,” Mati Dancyg said Tuesday on Kan, Israel’s public radio network, adding, “Netanyahu chose to sacrifice the hostages.’’
Mr. Netanyahu has blamed Hamas for obstructing a deal. Mr. Netanyahu’s critics in Israel, as well as Hamas officials, say that Mr. Netanyahu recently added new conditions to a proposal outlined by President Biden in late May, adding to the difficulty of finalizing a deal.
“Our hearts grieve over the terrible loss,” Mr. Netanyahu said in a statement on Tuesday following the military’s announcement about the retrieval of the bodies. “The State of Israel will continue to make every effort to return all of our hostages — the living and the deceased.”
Mr. Munder, 79, Mr. Peri, 80, Mr. Metzger, 80, and Mr. Dancyg, 75, were all abducted alive on Oct. 7 from Nir Oz, a kibbutz, or communal village, near the Gaza border. Mr. Popplewell, 51, and Mr. Buchshtab, 35, were taken from another border community, Nirim.
The Hostages Families Forum, an organization that represents many of the hostages’ relatives, said in a statement on Tuesday that “Israel has a moral and ethical obligation to return all the murdered for dignified burial and to bring all living hostages home for rehabilitation.”
“The immediate return of the remaining 109 hostages,” it added, “can only be achieved through a negotiated deal.”
Gabby Sobelman contributed reporting.
— Isabel Kershner reporting from Jerusalem
