Hamas is preventing a ceasefire deal, US President Joe Biden told reporters in Italy as the terror group continued to insist on amendments which American and Israeli officials found unworkable.
“I've laid out on an approach that has been endorsed by the UN Security Council, by the G7, by the Israelis,” he said as he referred to the three-phase which he first unveiled on May 31.
“The biggest hang-up so far is Hamas refusing to sign on even though they have submitted something similar,” Biden said, adding that it remained to be seen whether the deal would come to fruition.
“We're going to continue to push,” he said, while in Italy for a meeting of the G7, where he discussed the situation with leaders from those countries, including Canada, Japan, France, Great Britain, and Germany.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken blamed Hamas leader Yayha Sinwar for the absence of a deal.
“It’s time for the haggling to stop; it’s time for a ceasefire to start,” Blinken stated.
There’s “one man who’s probably somewhere deep underground in Gaza for Hamas, Mr. Sinwar, who’s making all of these decisions. Well, he’s relatively safe underground. The people that he purports to represent, they’re suffering every day. So if he has their interests at heart, he will come to a conclusion to bring this to a conclusion.”
US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan pushed back Hamas’s attempt to portray the situation as one in which they had accepted the project but Israel had rejected it.
Hamas says one thing means another
“I do think Hamas’s assertion that they have accepted that proposal to the extent that they are saying that publicly is not correct,” Sullivan told reporters.
He spoke two days after Hamas responded to a proposal for a three-phase hostage deal with a request for amendments.
“What they have done is responded to that proposal, with an amended proposal. As I said yesterday, some of those amendments are modest [and] minor. They're not unanticipated. We can work through them. Others are not consistent with what President Biden laid out or with the UN Security Council embraced.
“But our goal is to figure out how we work to bridge the remaining gaps and get a deal,” Sullivan said.
“It is important for the world to continue to train [place] the focus on Hamas, who has said … it wants to get to a ceasefire,” Sullivan said.
“if in fact it does, there's a ceasefire on the table. They should take it and not try to push this thing in a direction where we just get to a stalemate. So I think continuing to encourage Hamas to step up and do its part will be an important thing for the rest of the world to do,” he stressed.
Frustrated Israeli officials decided not to send any further teams to hold negotiations until such time as Hamas accepted a deal.
A senior Hamas leader told Reuters on Thursday that Hamas’s requested changes are "not significant.” Among the amendments he pointed out was a demand to choose a list of 100 Palestinians with long sentences to be released from Israeli jails.
The proposal had excluded 100 prisoners with long sentences and restricted releases to only prisoners with sentences of less than 15 years remaining, the Hamas official said.
Multiple reports have stipulated that the Hamas amendments hold fast to the initial demand that Israel must agree in writing to end the war and withdraw the IDF from Gaza, at the start of the agreement.
The proposal Biden unveiled left the question of a permanent ceasefire to the second phase of the deal. It essentially exchanges the release of some 33 hostages — designated as humanitarian cases — over a six-week period, in exchange for a temporary halt to the fighting and the freeing of Palestinian security prisoners and terrorists from Israeli jails. The IDF would also withdraw from populated areas of Gaza.
The question of a permanent ceasefire, the basis of phase 2 of the agreement, would be subject to negotiation during that period starting from day 16 of the agreement.
Under Hamas’s amendments, details of which were published on the Egyptian website Al-Majallah on Thursday, that ceasefire and withdrawal, which would occur in stages, would be agreed upon from the start, so that phase one would move into phase two.
Israel would also have to withdraw from the “Philadelphi Corridor, Wadi Gaza, Netzarim axis, and Kuwait roundabout” in phase one, according to the Hamas amendment reported on by Al-Majallah.
Hamas has also demanded that China, Russia, Turkey, and the UN be guarantors of the agreement alongside the United States, Qatar, and Egypt. The latter two countries are the main mediators for the deal.
Other demands by Hamas in its amendments include a lifting of all restrictions on the entry of goods and people into Gaza already in the second phase, and the ability for 50 wounded Hamas combatants to leave Gaza for medical treatment.
Sullivan told reporters that the US was “working actively to generate a path forward based on what Hamas has come in with. That gets us to a result that's consistent with what the UN Security Council laid out, that consistent with President it laid out. We believe that is possible.”