Israel won’t make a hostage deal at any price Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Tuesday in advance of high-level negotiations slated for later this week.
He made his comments to victims groups, just after the IDF was able to retrieve six bodies of Israelis killed in captivity in the enclave.
“I am not sure that there will be a [hostage] deal,” Netanyahu said according to a statement put out by both groups he met with. These were the Valor Forum representing victims of the Israel-Hamas war and the Tikva Forum composed of relatives of hostages in Gaza.
“If there is a deal, it will be one that safeguards those [Israeli] interests which I have repeatedly stressed, which is preserving Israel’s strategic assets,” Netanyahu told the two groups, both of whom support a firm stand with regard to a deal.
He met with them a day after speaking for three hours with US Secretary Antony Blinken who is in the region in an attempt to finalize a deal.
Accusations continue to surface that security officials believed Netanyahu was adding unnecessary conditions to the deal in order to sabotage it.
Government spokesperson David Mercer stressed that Netanyahu was “willing to be flexible” and that these were complex talks, as he blamed Hamas for the absence of an agreement.
Statements put out by the Prime Minister’s Office stressed that Netanyahu planned to stand firm, particularly on three points: no initial permanent ceasefire, an IDF presence in the critical Philadelphi Corridor, and the maximal return of hostages in the first phase of the agreement.
“We will not accept an outline that includes an end to the war [a permanent ceasefire] as an initial condition,” he told the two groups.
Hamas must be relinquished, Netanyahu asserts
Netanyahu has insisted that the Gaza war must continue until Hamas is completely vanquished from Gaza, whereas the terror group has stood firm on the idea that any hostage deal must include an agreement by Israel to end the war.
The proposal US President Joe Biden unveiled at the White House on May 31, and which is the basis for the current discussions, attempted to bridge that dispute by creating a three-phase agreement that allowed for the first stage of the deal to get underway without resolving that issue.
Phase two would only take place, once the question of a permanent ceasefire was answered.
The release of the remaining 73 live hostages would take place during phases one and two of the deal, with the first phase expected to see 18-35 hostages returned. It is not clear how many of them would be alive and how many would be deceased.
“Hamas demanded an end to the war as a condition to enter phase one of the deal – and we did not accept it. They demanded an end to the war even during the phase 2 transition negotiations – and they didn’t get that either,” he stated.
Netanyahu also stressed the importance of an IDF presence in the critical buffer zone between Gaza and Egypt, under which Hamas smuggled weapons into the enclave through the use of tunnels. He also wants the IDF to remain in the strategic Netzarim Corridor.
“I am not ready to withdraw from the Philadelphia Corridor in the face of domestic and foreign pressures. If we leave there, there will be tremendous political pressure on us not to return there – but there will be no such pressure if we stay there.
“Therefore, for the foreseeable future, we will remain there physically. It’s a sensitive political-strategic consideration, and I’m not going to give it up,” he said.
According to the forums, Netanyahu had stressed this point to US Secretary of State Antony Blinken when the two men met in Jerusalem for three hours on Monday.
Netanyahu spoke as the New York Times reported that the US has put forward a proposal under which the IDF would jointly patrol the Philadelphi Corridor with Egyptian forces.
Blinken seemed to indicate to reporters on Monday that the issue of the Philadelphi Corridor had not yet been laid out in the “bridging proposal” it had given Israel and Hamas last week.
Officials connected to the negotiation teams told KAN that there was no other explanation for Netanyahu’s stances other than that he wanted to disrupt negotiators for a deal given that he knew that Philadelphi was under discussion and that advancements were being made on the topic.
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