Last Friday, the White House released a joint statement with Qatar and Egypt letting the world know that cease-fire talks between Israel and Hamas were in their final stage. A so-called bridging proposal was sent to both parties in an attempt to close the remaining gaps and finally bring an agreement to fruition.
It took only a few hours before Hamas, the terrorist group that started the war by attacking Israel on Oct. 7, killing around 1,200 people and taking another 250 to Gaza as hostages, panned the bridging proposal as biased in Israel’s favor. The group alleged that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was yet again making more demands, refusing to budge on withdrawing Israeli troops from Gaza and using the diplomatic process as a smoke screen as the Israeli military continues pummeling the battered Palestinian enclave. Netanyahu, in turn, continues to allege that while there are some items Israel is willing to compromise on—the identities and number of Palestinian prisoners to be released, for example—there are other issues it isn’t willing to negotiate on.
All of this leaves President Joe Biden’s administration between a rock and a hard place. The White House has gone to extraordinary lengths to clinch an agreement that would end the 10-month war that has killed about 40,000 Palestinians, damaged more than 70% of Gaza’s housing and sullied Israel’s international reputation. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has traveled to the Middle East nine times since the war started, which includes a trip this week. CIA Director William Burns has been jetting to Cairo, Doha and Jerusalem on countless occasions this year, working with his Qatari and Egyptian counterparts to construct a draft that Israel and Hamas would find acceptable. Biden has a lot riding on this process; the deadliest war in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict started on his watch, and he would love to find a way to end it before vacating the White House in January. Blinken underscored the stakes Monday: “This is a decisive moment, probably the best, maybe the last, opportunity to get the hostages home, to get a cease-fire and to put everyone on a better path to enduring peace and security.”
He isn’t wrong. While we’ve seen Israel-Hamas talks collapse multiple times this year, this round of diplomacy feels eerily different. So much time, attention and political capital have been devoted to the talks since May 31, when Biden pitched a three-stage framework agreement to stop the violence, get the hostages back to their families and begin the long, expensive, arduous process of rebuilding the Gaza strip. The first stage would involve a six-week cease-fire, the release of some hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners and the beginning of talks on a comprehensive end to the war.
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