Statements From Netanyahu and Hamas Narrow Hopes for a Truce in Gaza (2024)

Despite the setbacks, negotiations over a possible cease-fire deal continue in Cairo.

Mr. Netanyahu’s insistence on being able to resume fighting drew widespread criticism on Monday in Israel, where there is growing support for a cease-fire deal that would involve the release of at least some of the Israeli hostages still held in Gaza.

Mr. Netanyahu’s governing coalition depends on support of ultranationalist leaders opposed to a permanent truce, and the backlash on Monday revived accusations that he was putting his personal interests above the nation’s.

Mr. Netanyahu insists that Hamas’s total defeat is in Israel’s strategic interest. But others say that the hostages’ freedom is a higher priority and that the prime minister’s main motivation is to avoid the collapse of his government.

The claims exemplify a wider dispute about Mr. Netanyahu, whose decision in 2020 to remain in politics, despite standing trial for corruption, worsened deep splits in Israeli society and prompted years of political instability.

The country’s military leadership believes that a cease-fire deal would be the swiftest way of releasing some 120 Israelis, some alive and some dead, who remain in Gaza. Recent polling also suggests that a majority of Israelis see the return of the hostages as a higher priority than continuing the battle against Hamas in Gaza.

Still, negotiations over a deal continued on Monday in Cairo, where Ronen Bar, the head of the Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, gathered for talks mediated by the Egyptian government. More discussions are scheduled for later this week in Qatar, another mediator between Israel and Hamas. Some officials and analysts said that the comments from both Mr. Netanyahu and Hamas could be construed as an attempt to drive a hard bargain, rather than a rejection of the negotiating process.

Along with reaching a compromise over the length of the cease-fire, the sides need to agree on the number and identity of the Palestinian prisoners to be exchanged for the hostages. They also need to agree about the extent to which Israeli troops should withdraw from Gaza; Hamas seeks a total withdrawal, while Israel hopes to retain control over some parts of the territory that it has captured.

After months of failed negotiations, hopes for a deal were revived last week amid reports that Hamas had become more flexible on critical points, prompting Mr. Netanyahu to send negotiators to Qatar.

But Mr. Netanyahu’s grip on power relies on the support of two far-right parties opposed to any agreement that would leave Hamas in power in Gaza. Critics say this has made him wary of committing to a hostage-release deal that could lead to the collapse of his coalition and prompt early elections that polling suggests he would lose. Mr. Netanyahu is currently standing trial on charges of corruption, accusations he denies, and his political future would be at stake if he lost power for the third time in his career.

“The simple truth is as follows: Benjamin Netanyahu doesn’t want a hostage deal,” Ben Caspit, a biographer and prominent critic of the prime minister, wrote on social media. “He might be willing to get the hostages back, but not at the expense of his coalition’s well-being.”

An influential minister in Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition, Bezalel Smotrich, underscored the coalition’s fragility on Monday by hinting on social media that his party could leave the coalition if the prime minister struck a deal that kept Hamas in power in Gaza.

“We will not be part of a deal to surrender to Hamas,” said Mr. Smotrich, a far-right firebrand whose party holds the balance of power in Mr. Netanyahu’s ruling coalition.

“This deal is a defeat and humiliation for Israel,” Mr. Smotrich added.

Some analysts believe Mr. Netanyahu may not personally be opposed to a deal but wants to maximize its chances of success by delaying it until the end of July, when Parliament goes on recess.

Without a sitting Parliament, lawmakers would find it far harder to bring down the government, giving Mr. Netanyahu more room to strike a deal that his coalition partners might resist, according to Nadav Shtrauchler, a former strategist for the prime minister.

“He’s trying to create room for maneuver — and for that, he needs time,” Mr. Shtrauchler said.

Mr. Netanyahu may also be using hardball negotiating tactics in order to force bigger compromises from Hamas. With each passing day, Israel’s military operation in the southern Gaza city of Rafah further weakens Hamas’s position there, Mr. Shtrauchler said.

“The efforts of the military in Gaza may help him get more from Hamas,” Mr. Shtrauchler said.

However, the leader of the opposition, Yair Lapid, working on the assumption that Mr. Netanyahu’s resistance to a swift deal is mainly political in nature, on Monday offered to help keep the prime minister in power if the government collapsed over a hostage deal.

“It is not true that he has to choose between the life of the hostages and the continuation of his tenure as prime minister,” Mr. Lapid said in a speech. “I promised him a safety net, and I will keep that promise.”

Mr. Netanyahu did not immediately respond to Mr. Lapid’s offer, but analysts and allies of the prime minister said he was unlikely to accept it because he does not trust Mr. Lapid’s intentions.

“Lapid will give him a parachute for this specific deal, but 24 hours later he will vanish,” Mr. Shtrauchler said.

“It’s not something that Netanyahu can consider reliable,” Mr. Shtrauchler added.

Gabby Sobelman contributed reporting from Rehovot, Israel.

A departing Israeli general condemns violence by Jewish settlers in the West Bank, and other news.

The Israeli military returned to an area of Gaza City where it said Hamas had re-established itself.

It added that the area it had moved into included the headquarters of the main United Nations agency that assists Palestinian refugees, known as UNRWA. Juliette Touma, the agency’s communications director, said it did not have any information about the military’s actions, but she noted that the agency had left its headquarters in October.

Israeli forces have repeatedly found themselves returning to parts of Gaza that they had previously left, especially in the north, which they invaded in October, as Hamas regroups amid the chaos of the nine-month war. The fighting has flared even as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has spoken of a new, less intense phase of the war.

The operation shows that Israel is still struggling to achieve one of its stated objectives in the war: wiping out Hamas, which organized and led the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel that set off the war in Gaza.

The military said it had warned civilians about its activity and opened a “defined route” for their evacuation. Wafa, the Palestinian Authority’s official news agency, reported “a massive exodus of thousands” of Palestinians from the area toward the northwestern neighborhoods of Gaza City.

The agency said Israeli military vehicles had entered areas in southwestern Gaza City, including the Tal al-Hawa neighborhood and the southern outskirts of the upscale Al-Rimal neighborhood. It added that residents reported heavy aircraft and artillery fire that killed and wounded dozens of people.

Ahmed Saleh, 44, who lives near Al-Rimal with 13 family members, said in a phone interview that the strikes began suddenly, “all kinds of strikes — tank shelling, artillery and aircraft.” He said they began receiving calls and text messages from the Israeli military telling them to evacuate, but only after the bombardment had begun.

Mr. Saleh said he managed to grab a bag with important documents and some clothes before fleeing with his family, including his 70-year-old mother, whose wheelchair broke on the way because of the bombed-out roads.

After borrowing another wheelchair, the family walked for another hour amid continued strikes, until they arrived at the house of Mr. Saleh’s sister outside the evacuation zone.

Mr. Saleh said that while fleeing his neighborhood, he saw “dozens of people” who had been killed or injured. He told people along the way to move west, “but they had to go east to collect their stuff and rescue their families,” he said. Many were caught in the bombardment, and “no one could reach them for help,” he said.

The Palestinian Red Crescent said in a statement that its emergency and rescue teams had evacuated at least 30 wounded people from a hospital in the Rimal neighborhood to the Indonesian Hospital, which is outside the evacuation zone.

Organized looters are attacking aid convoys in search of contraband cigarettes, officials say.

To evade Israeli inspections, smugglers — mostly in Egypt — have been hiding them in sacks of United Nations-donated flour, diapers and even a watermelon, according to aid agencies and an Israeli military official who shared photos with The New York Times.

Aid trucks that set off from the crossing into Gaza were then attacked by crowds of Palestinians, some of them armed, seeking the cigarettes hidden inside, according to U.N. and Israeli officials.

Andrea De Domenico, who runs the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Jerusalem, confirmed that aid officials had “seen cartons of U.N.-branded assistance with cigarettes inside.” He said the contraband cigarettes had created “a new dynamic” of organized attacks on aid convoys.

Israel’s near-total control of the goods that enter Gaza amid the war has warped the enclave’s economy. The price of flour has plunged in parts of Gaza because Israel, under intense international pressure to ease hunger, has allowed aid agencies to pump in large amounts of it. Other commodities, which have entered less frequently, remain rarer and more expensive.

Mr. De Domenico showed The Times footage he had taken during a recent drive along the road leading into Gaza from Kerem Shalom: Full flour bags can be seen strewed along the side of the road, seemingly of little interest to the looters.

“Their main purpose here was to search for the cigarettes,” said Manhal Shaibar, who runs a Palestinian trucking company at Kerem Shalom that ferries U.N. aid.

Officials said that most of the trucks bearing cigarettes appeared to come from Egypt, which rerouted trucks arriving from Egyptian territory through Kerem Shalom after Israel captured the Rafah border crossing in early May. Mr. Shaibar attributed the smuggling operation to Bedouin families with a footprint in both Gaza and the Egyptian Sinai.

The looting is a product of the anarchy that has gripped much of Gaza as Israel’s war against Hamas enters its 10th month. Israeli forces have targeted Hamas’s governing apparatus and police without installing any new administration in their place, creating widespread lawlessness.

Even as deprivation in southern Gaza has deepened amid a new wave of Israeli military evacuation orders, the contents of over 1,000 aid trucks have been stuck for weeks at the Gazan side of the Kerem Shalom crossing, according to the Israeli authorities. Fearing attack, aid agencies have hesitated to send trucks to collect and distribute the goods.

Israel says it has made efforts to ensure U.N. agencies can collect the goods, including by paving new roads, and points out that private merchants have been able to bear the difficult conditions to pick up their wares. Aid officials say Israel could do much more, including allowing them to expand their use of other roads and crossings.

Convoys ferrying U.N. aid are often an easier target than private businessmen, who are willing to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars in protection money to guards or to the organized gangs themselves.

U.N. and Israeli officials said the smugglers outside Gaza were closely coordinated with organized groups inside the territory that have blocked aid trucks with light arms, clubs and improvised roadblocks. After successfully halting convoys, the looters often appeared to know precisely where to find the cigarettes hidden inside, Mr. De Domenico said.

“These attacks have been very targeted,” he said. “They go exactly into the pallet” where the cigarettes are.

Col. Elad Goren, a senior official in COGAT, the Israeli agency that oversees Palestinian civilian affairs, said the smuggling appeared to originate in Egypt; other people familiar with the trade shared his assessment.

“Most of the packages we’ve been able to get our hands on,” Colonel Goren said. “But we believe that things need to be done on the Egyptian side in order to stop the smuggling.”

The Egyptian government’s press office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

One cigarette seller in Gaza City said prices could range up to $40 per cigarette for more sought-after brands. Desperate smokers were willing to pay the high prices, despite being impoverished after several months of war, he said.

The seller, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he feared retribution, said Hamas forces were still present in the area but not as police to apply the law, just as “mafias.”

A departing Israeli military leader denounces Jewish settler violence in the West Bank.

General f*cks also expressed dismay over an increase in settler violence in the West Bank, which is home to about 2.7 million Palestinians and a Jewish settler population that has grown to well over 500,000. An extremist minority of violent settlers, he said, had been undermining Israel’s reputation internationally and sowing fear among Palestinians. “That, to me, is not Judaism,” he said. “At least not what I was raised on in my father’s and mother’s home. That is not the way of the Torah.”

Israel seized control of the West Bank from Jordan in 1967 during a war with three Arab states, and Israeli civilians have since settled there with both the tacit and explicit approval of the government, living under Israeli civil law while their Palestinian neighbors are subject to Israeli military law.

The international community largely views Israeli settlements in the West Bank as illegal, and many of them are illegal under Israeli law but are tolerated by the government. Many outposts that began as illegal under Israeli law have subsequently been legitimized by the government, and Palestinians have long argued that they are a creeping annexation that turns land needed for any independent Palestinian state into an unmanageable patchwork.

Last year, the United Nations reported that attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank had surged in the weeks following the Oct. 7 attacks that set off the war in Gaza between Israel and Hamas, with at least 115 killed, more than 2,000 injured and nearly 1,000 others forcibly displaced from their homes, citing violence and intimidation by Israeli forces and settlers.

General f*cks argued that terrifying the Palestinians living alongside Jews was “a dangerous mistake” and that the actions of violent Jewish settlers threatened Israel’s security.

But Mr. Smotrich has been vocal about wanting Israel to claim all of the West Bank. Last month, he struck a deal with ministers to release some money withheld from the Palestinian Authority in exchange for the legalization of five more Jewish outposts, and last week, the finance ministry released about $136 million.

Mr. Smotrich said in a post on social media that day that he was working with planning authorities on approving more than 5,000 additional housing units in the West Bank. “We’re building the good country and thwarting the creation of a Palestinian state,” he said.

Last month an Israeli ministry approved the largest seizure of West Bank land since the 1993 Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestinians, claiming about five square miles in the Jordan Valley, according to Peace Now, an Israeli group that monitors settler activity. Israel has seized roughly nine square miles of the territory this year, making 2024 by far the peak year for appropriations, Peace Now said.

While settlers and ministers are defiant, their activities are a source of tension for Israel with other nations, including its ally the United States, at a time when it is increasingly isolated in the world over its conduct of the war in Gaza.

“Settlements continue to be counterproductive to a two-state solution,” John Kirby, the national security spokesman for the White House, said in a briefing with reporters on Monday. “We don’t support that.”

Johnatan Reiss contributed reporting.