Hamas should accept the Gaza ceasefire proposal on the table if it stands behind its assertion that it wants the war to end, US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan told reporters as he rejected the terror’s groups assertion that it had accepted the proposal.
“I do think Hamas’s assertion that they have accepted that proposal to the extent that they are saying that publicly is not correct,” Sullivan told reporters traveling with US President Joe Biden in Italy for a meeting of the G7.
He spoke two days after Hamas responded to a proposal for a three-phase hostage deal with a request for amendments, some of which have been characterized by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken as unworkable.
Biden is expected to secure the help of other G7 countries, France, Germany, Italy, Great Britain, Canada, and Japan, which have already backed the agreement, to pressure Hamas to accept the deal. The United Nations Security Council and the EU have also accepted the plan.
“What they have done is responded to that proposal, with an amended proposal. As I said yesterday, some of those amendments are modest [and] minor. They’re not unanticipated. We can work through them. Others are not consistent with what President Biden laid out or with the UN Security Council embraced.
“But our goal is to figure out how we work to bridge the remaining gaps and get a deal,” Sullivan said.“It is important for the world to continue to train [place] the focus on Hamas, who has said … it wants to get to a ceasefire,” Sullivan said.
“If in fact it does, there’s a ceasefire on the table. They should take it and not try to push this thing in a direction where we just get to a stalemate. So I think continuing to encourage Hamas to step up and do its part will be an important thing for the rest of the world to do,” he stressed.
Hamas requesting ‘minor’ changes?
A senior Hamas leader told Reuters on Thursday that Hamas’s requested changes are “not significant.” Among the amendments he pointed out was a demand to choose a list of 100 Palestinians with long sentences to be released from Israeli jails.
The proposal had excluded 100 prisoners with long sentences and restricted releases to only prisoners with sentences of less than 15 years remaining, the Hamas official said.
Multiple reports have stipulated that the Hamas amendments hold fast to the initial demand that Israel must agree in writing to end the war and withdraw the IDF from Gaza at the start of the agreement.
The proposal Biden unveiled left the question of a permanent ceasefire to the second phase of the deal. It essentially exchanges the release of some 33 hostages — designated as humanitarian cases — over a six-week period in exchange for a temporary halt to the fighting and the freeing of Palestinian security prisoners and terrorists from Israeli jails. The IDF would also withdraw from populated areas of Gaza.
The question of a permanent ceasefire, the basis of phase 2 of the agreement, would be subject to negotiation during that period starting from day 16 of the agreement.
Under Hamas’s amendments, details of which were published on the Egyptian website Al-Majallah on Thursday, that ceasefire and withdrawal, which would occur in stages, would be agreed upon from the start so that phase one would move into phase two.
According to the Hamas amendment reported by Al-Majallah, Israel would also have to withdraw from the “Philadelphi Corridor, Wadi Gaza, Netzarim axis, and Kuwait roundabout” in phase one.
Hamas has also demanded that China, Russia, Turkey, and the Un be guarantors of the agreement alongside the United States, Qatar, and Egypt. The latter two countries are the main mediators for the deal.
Other demands by Hamas in its amendments include a lifting of all restrictions on the entry of goods and people into Gaza, already in the second phase, and the ability for 50 wounded Hamas combatants to leave Gaza for medical treatment.
Sullivan told reporters that the US was “working actively to generate a path forward based on what Hamas has come in with. That gets us to a result consistent with what the UN Security Council laid out, that is consistent with what the President laid out. We believe that is possible.”
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