White House: In call with Netanyahu, Biden stresses urgency of ceasefire-hostage

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke with US President Joe Biden by phone on Wednesday as efforts to reach a hostage deal floundered after recent optimism that a breakthrough was in the works.

Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate, also joined the call, according to the White House.

During the call, Biden “stressed the urgency of bringing the ceasefire and hostage release deal to closure and discussed upcoming talks in Cairo to remove any remaining obstacle,” the White House said in a readout of the conversation.

The two leaders also “discussed active and ongoing US efforts to support Israel’s defense against all threats from Iran, including its proxy terrorist groups Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis, to include ongoing defensive US military deployments,” the brief US readout added.

Netanyahu’s office would not comment on the conversation.

Biden’s Secretary of State Antony Blinken was in the region this week pushing an American “bridging proposal” designed to get beyond disagreements between Israel and Hamas over issues like IDF deployment on the Gaza-Egypt border in the event of a deal.

Speaking to the press on Monday, Blinken praised Netanyahu for backing the proposal.

But Blinken’s approach rubbed some the wrong way. Two Arab officials from a mediating country and a third official involved in the talks told The Times of Israel that Blinken went too far to accommodate Netanyahu’s positions on continued IDF presence in the Philadelphi and Netzarim corridors.

An Arab official lamented that there’s no point in holding the planned high-level gathering of negotiators later this week in Cairo unless the US pressures Netanyahu to back off his new demands and amends its bridging proposal accordingly.

A second Arab official expressed bewilderment at Blinken’s repeated public insistence in recent days that Netanyahu backs the US bridging proposal, arguing that this inaccurately frames Hamas as the lone obstructionist party.

The Arab official pointed to comments that the Israeli premier has continued to make about the need for a permanent Israeli military presence in the Philadelphi Corridor to prevent weapons smuggling from Egypt into Gaza.

A third official involved in the talks said the US bridging proposal doesn’t allow for a permanent Israeli presence in the corridor but also doesn’t rule out such deployment entirely.

At a meeting on Tuesday, Netanyahu reportedly told a group of relatives of soldiers who were killed on October 7 and of hostages held in Gaza that “Israel won’t leave the Philadelphi Corridor and the Netzarim Corridor under any circumstances.”

Such statements harm efforts to maintain talks with Hamas, the official said.

Hamas has made clear after forgoing its demand for an up-front Israeli ceasefire commitment that it won’t accept continued Israeli presence in Rafah and Netzarim, “so [Netanyahu] is going to have to decide whether he wants to stick to these new demands or whether he wants to bring hostages home alive,” said the official.

In a joint statement with the Palestinian Islamic Jihad on Wednesday night, Hamas confirmed that it would not accept anything less than an agreement that included “a comprehensive ceasefire, a complete withdrawal [of Israeli troops] from the Gaza Strip, the beginning of reconstruction and the end of the blockade.”

The terror groups said that they held Israel’s leaders “responsible for the collapse of the efforts made by the mediators by insisting on continuing the aggression and denying what was agreed upon in the previous stages, especially the proposal that the movement agreed to on July 2.”

The July 2 proposal, which Netanyahu dismissed, was itself a response to the Israeli proposal made public by Biden in late May.

According to Kan news, Netanyahu agreed in his meeting with Blinken on Monday to withdraw IDF troops from the Philadelphi Corridor in the second stage…