The hostage deal on the table can move forward without an Israeli pledge to end the Gaza war now, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said as he awaited Hamas’s response to the latest proposal to free the remaining 124 captives."We are working in countless ways to return our hostages,” Netanyahu said, adding, “I think about them constantly, about their families and their suffering.”He issued a public defense of the deal unveiled Friday night by US President Joe Biden in Washington as his far-right coalition partners Otzma Yehudit and Religious Zionist Party threatened to bolt the government should it approve any agreement that demanded a premature end to the war.
Netanyahu pushed back in public and in private, stressing that Israel has gone a long way to return the hostages, “while adhering to the objectives of the war, first and foremost the elimination of Hamas.”Israel is “insistent that we will achieve both” the return of the hostages and the destruction of Hamas, Netanyahu said.“This is part of the outline” Biden presented and “not something that I have just added because of coalition pressure. This is something that we agreed on in the War Cabinet unanimously,” Netanyahu said.
He issued similar statements in a closed-door session of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, where according to a source, he said that “Israel does not commit to ending the war before all of its goals are achieved.”He reiterated Israel’s three goals: to destroy Hamas, to free the hostages, and to ensure that Gaza would not pose a threat to Israel.
The three-phased plan
Biden on Friday outlined a three-phase plan, that would see the release of all the live hostages in the first two phases. The first phase, which would last for six weeks, would include a temporary halt to the fighting and the withdrawal of IDF soldiers from populated areas of the enclave. Women, the elderly, ill, and infirmed — would be freed in this phase, in exchange for an unspecified number of Palestinian security prisoners, while the remainder of the captives would be released in the second phase.