The White House is pushing Israel to agree to a permanent cease-fire in the Gaza Strip, as U.S. President Joe Biden’s peace-plan proposal reveals a gaping division within the administration of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
After a tense week of diplomatic posturing, White House national security spokesperson John Kirby said on Sunday that if Hamas accepts the deal to end the Gaza war, the U.S. expects Israel to accept the plan too.
“This was an Israeli proposal. We have every expectation that if Hamas agrees to the proposal … then Israel would say yes,” Kirby told ABC News’ This Week program.
The controversy began on Wednesday, when Israel’s war cabinet made an offer for a ceasefire to Hamas, against the wishes of Netanyahu. Hamas rejected the bid on Thursday, but seemed to reconsider when Biden urged them to on Friday, saying they viewed the offer “positively.”
Netanyahu then tried to backtrack on his own war cabinet’s proposal on Saturday, arguing that any deal that didn’t destroy Hamas was a “non-starter.” Two far-right ministers doubled-down on that argument, threatening to quit — and thereby dissolve the coalition government — if Netanyahu accepted the deal.
One of Netanyahu’s senior aides further muddied the waters by telling Britain’s Sunday Times that the plan was “a deal we agreed to — it’s not a good deal but we dearly want the hostages released, all of them,” before declaring that it could only work if Hamas was destroyed — a contradiction of the cease-fire proposal.
The flip-flopping has irked both Netanyahu’s domestic opponents and foreign partners. “Israel has already announced that it has accepted the deal. If it retracts it now, it is a death sentence for the [hostages] and a crisis of trust with the Americans and the mediating countries,” wrote opposition leader Yair Lapid on X on Sunday.
The three-part cease-fire plan is backed by the European Commission, the U.K., Germany, France, Egypt, Qatar and other Arab governments. It would begin with Israeli troops pulling out of Gaza’s cities, releasing humanitarian aid and freeing hundreds of Palestinian prisoners in exchange for Hamas returning some of the hostages and captured Israeli soldiers.
After that, the two sides would discuss a full hostage release and military withdrawal, followed by multilateral talks to rebuild Gaza without rearming Hamas.
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