WASHINGTON: In Middle East capitals, at the United Nations, from the White House and beyond, the Biden administration is making its most intense diplomatic push of the eight-month-old war in Gaza to convince Israeli and Hamas to take a proposed agreement that would bring a truce and release of more captive.
But one week into the US pressure campaign, the international community still is waiting for signs that the truce appeal begun May 31 by US President Joe Biden was working, by moving Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas leaders toward a negotiating breakthrough.
For Israel and Hamas, the US press has become a public test of whether either side is ready to halt fighting — at least on any terms that fall short of their professed targets, whether it is the complete crushing of Hamas or the complete withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza.
For President Biden, who describes the proposal as Israeli, it is the latest high-profile test of American leadership in attempting to force ally Israel as Hamas to relent in a conflict that is killing tens of thousands of people, inflaming regional tensions and also gripping much of the administration’s focus.
It was not that the truce proposal President Biden outlined in a televised address from the White House a week ago was startingly new. It was that Biden laid out the terms to the international community and put the full weight of the American presidency behind the appeal for both parties to take this agreement.
The terms that the US President described for the first of three phases sounded much like the agreement that US, Egyptian, and Qatari mediators and Hamas and Israel have been haggling over for months.
There would be a six-week truce in which Israeli troops pulled back from populated areas of the Gaza Strip. In exchange for Israel releasing hundreds of Palestinians detainees, Hamas would release some women and wounded among captives.
“Everyone who wants peace now must raise their voices and let the leaders know they should take this deal,” President Biden said a week ago.
But by Friday, neither Hamas nor Israel had said yes. Israeli PM says the terms of the proposal are not as they have been described publicly and that they will never cease war until “the destruction” of Hamas.
Hamas is likely to deliver a formal response in coming days to the proposal that President Biden is pushing. However, senior Hamas official Osama Hamdan told media this week in Beirut that Biden’s announcement was “positive” but said the group could not accept any agreement without Israel’s guarantee of a permanent truce, a complete withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza, a prisoner exchange and other conditions.
Jonathan Panikoff, a former US official told AP that the US is going to do everything it can in some formulation to keep pushing this deal.
