Ceasefire proposal between Israel and Hamas threatened by Netanyahu’s stance on Gaza’s border with Egypt

International mediators are finalising a new ceasefire proposal to narrow the gaps between Israel and Hamas, US and regional officials have said, even as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insists he will not give up control of the Gaza Strip’s border with Egypt – a key stumbling block for a deal.
Qatar and Egypt have drafted a series of revisions that are being discussed with US officials, according to a senior official from one of the mediating countries and two Israeli officials. David Barnea, director of the Israeli intelligence service Mossad, was in Doha, Qatar, on Monday to discuss the document, the officials said.
The US officials said that they expected to complete what they term a “final” proposal with Egyptian and Qatari negotiators Wednesday or Thursday. But a senior US official acknowledged that previous plans have also been called final, and then revised.
In interviews, US officials described two major sticking points that for months have delayed a deal to end the fighting in the Gaza Strip and to release hostages kidnapped by Hamas and Palestinians held in Israeli prisons.
One remaining stumbling block is how many people each side would set free and who they would be. On that question, Hamas has never come to an agreement, US officials said.
The other outstanding dispute hinges on whether and how quickly Israel would withdraw its troops from the Philadelphi corridor, a narrow strip of Gaza along the Egyptian border. Israel initially agreed to a phased withdrawal plan, officials say, only to see Netanyahu upend that deal last week.
All of the officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive negotiations over proposals that have yet to be finalised. Israeli officials and Hamas leaders have expressed pessimism about the prospects for an agreement, despite rising public fury in Israel over the failure to bring home the remaining hostages held in Gaza.
Even as negotiators have traded ideas to break the deadlock between Israel and Hamas, Netanyahu gave a fiery speech Monday, defying critics who have blamed him for not doing enough to reach a deal. He was similarly adamant Wednesday in a news conference for English-language news outlets.
Netanyahu repeated his long-standing demand that Israel must retain control of the Philadelphi corridor, to prevent Hamas from rearming through cross-Border smuggling. “People said, ‘If you stay, this will kill the deal.’ And I say, ‘Such a deal will kill us,’” he said pn Wednesday.
Hamas has insisted on a complete Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, and Egypt has objected strenuously to an Israeli military presence in the corridor. “Without withdrawing from the Philadelphi corridor, there will be no agreement,” Khalil al-Hayya, Hamas’ lead negotiator, told the pan-Arab broadcaster Al Jazeera this week.
Netanyahu has sent mixed messages over whether he has called for Israeli troops to remain on Gaza’s border with Egypt solely during the six-week first phase of a truce or as part of a permanent ceasefire.
He told reporters on Wednesday that the corridor must be controlled by an outside force, over the long haul, to prevent weapons smuggling. He said that could be someone other than the Israeli military – in theory, at least – but that in reality, he doubted anyone else would do the job.
“Bring anyone who will actually show us – not on paper, not in words, not in a slide, but on the ground, day after day, week after week, month after month – that they can actually prevent the recurrence of what happened there before,” Netanyahu said. “We’re open to considering it. But I don’t see that happening right now. And until that happens, we’re there.”
Another Israeli official and multiple US officials painted a somewhat different picture of Israel’s stance, saying the government understood that it would have to withdraw in the event that the deal moved forward to its second and third phases.
Shock and fury engulfed Israel this week after soldiers found the bodies of six Israeli hostages, all of whom were recently shot dead by Hamas, according to Israeli officials. Hamas issued contradictory statements in response, but at least one by its military wing in Gaza strongly implied that the hostages were executed after their captors understood Israeli troops were nearby.
Many Israelis blamed Netanyahu for the failure to bring the hostages back alive, accusing him of prolonging the war to appease his far-right coalition allies rather than striking a deal to free the captives. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis took to the streets in mass protests demanding an agreement with Hamas or participated in an hourslong general strike.
But both actions ultimately fizzled, revealing a country deeply divided over the price it should pay for bringing home the more than 60 hostages believed to be alive and the bodies of roughly 35 others still in Gaza.
Hamas has been releasing videos of the dead hostages, made when they were living captives – a practice that Israeli officials have labelled “psychological terrorism”. On Tuesday night, the group released footage of Ori Danino (25).
On Wednesday, it released a video showing Carmel Gat (40) and Alexander Lobanov (32). Lobanov, like Danino, was abducted from the site of a music festival during the Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7th. Gat was kidnapped in Be’eri, a kibbutz.
Rights groups and international law experts say that a hostage video is, by definition, made under duress and that the statements in it are usually coerced. The footage appears to have been edited, and it is not clear when it was recorded. – The New York Times