‘Proposal presented by Joe Biden is incomplete’: Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel, on the truce plan in Gaza

“The claim that we agreed to a ceasefire without our conditions being met is not true. (…) The proposal that Biden presented is incomplete,” Netanyahu said today before the Defense and Foreign Affairs Committee of the Knesset (Parliament Israeli).

“The war will stop to recover the hostages and then we will have talks. There are details that the American president did not present to the public,” he added.

(You can read: The reasons that lead Israel to continue its offensive in Gaza despite pressure from the international community)

His words contradict Biden’s announcement, in which after a first phase of six weeks – during which Israeli troops would abandon populated areas of the Strip and Israeli women, elderly and wounded would be released – he would begin. a second phase that would include “the permanent end of hostilities” and the release of the rest of the hostages, including soldiers.

According to Biden, this second phase would require intense dialogue since the conditions of the definitive ceasefire are still unclear, something that has also been criticized by Hamas leaders, who consider the proposal ambiguous and without a solid commitment from the United States that the war will not be resumed.

After his intervention in the parliamentary Defense and Foreign Committee, Netanyahu published a message on his social networks in which he assured that the Government is working “in countless ways to return our kidnapped people.”
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(Keep reading: Israel: far-right ministers threaten to overthrow Netanyahu’s government if it accepts a truce with Hamas)

The proposal has also sparked rejection from Netanyahu’s far-right coalition partners, who consider it a capitulation to the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas. Biden’s plan “is an offer of defeat,” said Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich today, who has threatened to leave the Executive if the prime minister accepts the truce.

The Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben Gvir, also denounced that he has gone to Netanyahu’s office twice to study the proposal and they have not let him see it. “If you sign an irresponsible agreement that ends the war without the collapse of Hamas, Jewish Power (Ben Gvir’s party) will dissolve the Government,” he told the president.
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(You can read: Israel: Benjamin Netanyahu insists that there will be no permanent ceasefire until Hamas is eliminated)

In Gaza, where more than 36,400 Palestinians have already died, according to the latest figures from health authorities, the main reaction to the American-Israeli intrigues about the truce is discouragement and skepticism.

“Biden now says that he will impose a truce, but we don’t trust it because they have sat down and negotiated a lot, but in the end nothing goes forward,” Tahrir Zaquot, a Gazan woman displaced in the Al Mawasi camp, in the south, tells EFE. of the Strip.

In these almost eight months of war, only one ceasefire agreement has come to fruition between Hamas and Israel, last November, which It lasted a week and allowed the release of 105 hostages in exchange for 240 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails.
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(You can read: One by one: we explain how the three phases of the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas presented by the United States would work)

“I hope the announcement of
this new pact is true because all we need is the end of this war and the end of this miserable life,” says Reem Al Agha, another Gazan woman and mother of four whose home is now also a store. campaign in the Al Mawasi area.

The area, where the Israeli Army encouraged the population of Rafah – many already displaced from other places in the Strip – to flee at the beginning of its military operation in the south, on May 6, has become a hive of shops. field where there is no drinking water or electricity.

“Many diseases are spreading from consuming salt water and people come to our clinics with diarrhea and gastroenteritis,” Paulo Milanesio, emergency coordinator for Doctors Without Borders (MSF) in Gaza, told EFE.

Throughout Gaza, Some 500,000 children under 14 years of age are at risk of suffering from malnutrition and dehydration, who already before October 7 received “no more than 90% of their nutritional needs”according to American pediatrician John Kahler, co-founder of the MedGlobal organization.

“The effects on the immune system are real, and as summer approaches, in combination with the increased need for water, we are going to see children die from diarrhea and dehydration,” said the pediatrician.