Tel Aviv, June 3:An aide to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed on Sunday that Israel had accepted a framework deal for winding down the Gaza war now being advanced by U.S. President Joe Biden, though he described it as flawed and in need of much more work.
In an interview with Britain’s Sunday Times, Ophir Falk, chief foreign policy advisor to Netanyahu, said Biden’s proposal was “a deal we agreed to ā it’s not a good deal but we dearly want the hostages released, all of them”.
An aide to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed on Sunday that Israel had accepted a framework deal for winding down the Gaza war now being advanced by U.S. President Joe Biden, though he described it as flawed and in need of much more work.
In an interview with Britain’s Sunday Times, Ophir Falk, chief foreign policy advisor to Netanyahu, said Biden’s proposal was “a deal we agreed to ā it’s not a good deal but we dearly want the hostages released, all of them”.
The first phase entails a truce and the return of some hostages held by Hamas, after which the sides would negotiate on an open-ended cessation of hostilities for a second phase in which remaining live captives would go free, Biden said.
That sequencing appears to imply that Hamas would continue to play a role in incremental arrangements mediated by Egypt and Qatar – a potential clash with Israel’s determination to resume the campaign to eliminate the Iranian-backed Islamist group.
Biden has hailed several ceasefire proposals over the past several months, each with similar frameworks to the one he outlined on Friday, all of which collapsed. In February he said Israel had agreed to halt fighting by Ramadan, the Muslim holy month that began on March 10. No such truce materialised.
The primary sticking point has been Israel’s insistence that it would discuss only temporary pauses to fighting until Hamas is destroyed. Hamas, which shows no sign of stepping aside, says it will free hostages only under a path to a permanent end to the war.
In his speech, Biden said his latest proposal “creates a better ‘day after’ in Gaza without Hamas in power”. He did not elaborate on how this would be achieved, and acknowledged that “there are a number of details to negotiate to move from phase one to phase two”.