Netanyahu threatens to continue the military operation in Rafah to increase pressure on Hamas
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Monday the war government had agreed to continue an operation in the city of Rafah to increase pressure on Hamas to release the hostages and achieve other war goals.
“The war cabinet unanimously decided that Israel should continue the operation in Rafah to exert military pressure on Hamas in order to make progress in the process of releasing our hostages and achieving other war goals,” Netanyahu’s office said in a statement.
“In parallel, and although Hamas’s proposal is far from the necessary Israeli demands, Israel will send a working delegation to the mediators in order to exhaust the possibility of reaching an agreement on terms acceptable to Israel”.
In the same context, the United States announced on Monday that it had received Hamas’s response agreeing to a truce with Israel, and that it was reviewing it with its regional partners.
State Department spokesman Matthew Miller told reporters, “I can confirm that Hamas has issued a response, and we are reviewing that response now, and discussing it with our partners in the region”.
Miller noted that CIA Director William Burns remains in the region to work on a deal.
Miller said, “We’ll discuss this response with our partners in the coming hours, the hostage deal and the ceasefire will be in the interests of both sides”.
This came after Hamas said in a statement that the head of its political bureau, Ismail Haniyeh, informed Qatar and Egypt of the movement’s approval of the two countries’ proposal to broker a ceasefire agreement with Israel in the Gaza Strip.
With the mediation of Egypt and Qatar and the participation of the United States, Israel and Hamas have been conducting indirect negotiations for months, which stalled in previous stages, to reach a prisoner exchange deal and a ceasefire in the besieged enclave.
Earlier in the day, the Associated Press quoted a spokesman for the National Security Council as saying that US President Joe Biden assured Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Washington’s concerns about the military operation in the southern Gaza Strip city of Rafah.
Biden assured Netanyahu that reaching a ceasefire with Hamas is the best way to protect the lives of hostages in Gaza.
According to the US National Security Council spokesman, “Biden will speak with Netanyahu on Monday morning,” (as Israel begins forcibly displacing Palestinians from Rafah).
