Netanyahu’s Spat With Biden Echoes Dispute With Israel’s Security Chiefs

Over the weekend, the previously private gripes gained a public airing when a major Israeli news network, Channel 12, aired accounts of leaked arguments between Mr. Netanyahu and the chiefs of Israel’s foreign and domestic intelligence agencies, Mossad and Shin Bet.

Channel 12 reported that the chiefs accused Mr. Netanyahu of blocking the deal, while the prime minister was said to have accused them of being weak negotiators.

Mr. Netanyahu has blamed Hamas’s intransigence for stalling the negotiations, rather than his own. But he did not deny private disputes with his security chiefs, complaining only that the leaked reports were themselves harmful to the negotiations.

“The fact is that it is Hamas which is preventing the release of our hostages, and which continues to oppose the outline, and not the government of Israel, which has accepted it,” Mr. Netanyahu told ministers at the start of a cabinet meeting on Sunday. Hamas has repeatedly denied the claim.

There is less debate within the Israeli establishment about the merits of assassinating Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas leader and top truce negotiator, who was killed in Iran last week.

Mr. Biden’s frustration with Mr. Netanyahu is in part related to the assassination, which the U.S. president said had “not helped” the prospects of a cease-fire agreement.

But among Israeli security officials, the prevailing assessment is that a deal could still be reached within days if Mr. Netanyahu set aside some of his conditions, according to the two Israeli officials who spoke on condition of anonymity.

To Israelis, Mr. Haniyeh was a liaison rather than a decision maker, and did not have the final say over Hamas’s position on a cease-fire.

Myra Noveck contributed reporting.

If they are validated, some people in Gaza most likely already have the virus. About three-quarters of infected people do not show symptoms, so polio can spread even if no cases have been confirmed, Mr. Lindmeier said.

But getting anything into Gaza is difficult nowadays. Aid groups say that since the war began, Israeli security restrictions on imports, attacks on aid convoys, damaged roads and the fighting and looting inside Gaza have kept them from distributing enough food, water, fuel, medical supplies, shelter equipment and materials for repairing sanitation and electricity systems. Even less aid has made it to where it needs to go since one of the main border crossings closed amid an Israeli offensive on the southern Gaza city of Rafah in early May.

“It’s not enough just to get it across the border,” Mr. Lindmeier said last week.

Without a halt to the fighting — or, at a minimum, roads cleared of rubble and conditions that would allow workers to administer the vaccines widely — the vaccine doses will sit at the crossing, stuck there just as other types of aid have been, he added.

From July 1 to July 29, according to U.N. data, an average of 77 truckloads of aid entered Gaza each day. From January to April, before the crossing closed, the daily average was 132 — which was not enough to keep thousands of Gazan children from descending into malnourishment, hospitals stocked with medicine and equipment, families in sturdy shelters or water and sewage systems up and running.

As the threat of famine and epidemics has hovered over Gaza for months, aid officials and health experts have said it is not enough to simply distribute canned food. They say people need a health care system capable of treating malnourishment and related diseases; clean water and functioning sewage systems to prevent infectious diseases from spreading; and a diverse diet.

Hepatitis A, acute respiratory infections, diarrhea, lice and scabies are already surging through the population, health officials say.

Israel says it is doing its part to facilitate the entry of aid. It says the United Nations’ numbers do not reflect airdrops, other aid routes the organization does not monitor or trucks carrying commercial goods for sale, which have kept Gazan markets supplied with limited amounts of fresh fruit, vegetables and other foods. But many people cannot afford to buy food, or they have trouble finding cash to pay for goods.

The U.N. data also includes only trucks that it is able to pick up at the border and move into Gaza, rather than the total number of trucks that pass Israeli inspection. Aid officials say organized crime and looting in Gaza often makes it too unsafe for them to move the trucks from border crossings to their destinations, leaving many supplies stranded.

Under Israeli requirements, the trucks Israel screens are half-full, but the inspected supplies are then reloaded onto new trucks on the Gaza side until they are full, meaning the number of trucks collected by the United Nations is far lower than the number that Israel says it has signed off on.