The US pressures for Hamas and Israel to accept the three-phase ceasefire proposal

The United States is pressing to move forward with the three-phase ceasefire proposal that its president, Joe Biden, announced last Friday. This Sunday, the White House spokesman for national security affairs, John Kirby, assured that if the Palestinian fundamentalist militia Hamas accepts the plan – about which it has already spoken in favorable terms – Washington hopes that Israel will also support it.

“We have every expectation that if Hamas approves the proposal as it has been transmitted to them, as an Israeli proposal, then Israel will say yes,” the spokesman declared in an interview with the program This Week from the ABC News television network.

On Friday, Biden detailed in a speech the content of the proposal, which he described as offered by the Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The first phase, lasting six weeks, would impose a temporary ceasefire, during which there would be an exchange of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners for the most vulnerable Israeli hostages held in Gaza since the October 7 attacks: women, the elderly, the wounded and the sick. In addition, humanitarian aid would be multiplied to reach 600 trucks a day and Palestinian refugees in the Strip could return to what remains of their homes.

During this stage, negotiators would agree on the details to launch the second phase, also lasting six weeks, in which the war would be definitively ended and the exchange of the remaining hostages would be completed. Israel would complete its withdrawal from Gaza. The third phase would be reconstruction.

Netanyahu seemed to refute the leader who has supported him most throughout the eight months of war, by replying that his country cannot accept an end to hostilities until Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement, is destroyed. But this Sunday, the prime minister’s international policy advisor stated that Israel accepts the agreement, although he does not consider it to be good for Israel and that there are “many details to be resolved.” For his part, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant insisted that his government will not accept Hamas continuing to lead Gaza at any stage of the process and is studying alternatives to the fundamentalist group.

“It is an Israeli proposal, one that they arrived at after intense diplomacy with their national security team and in the State Department,” Kirby insisted. “What we are now is that this proposal has been transmitted to Hamas. It was done Thursday night, our time. We are waiting for an official response from Hamas. We note that senior Hamas officials have publicly come out to welcome this proposal.”

In his speech, Biden maintained that the radical Palestinian militia no longer has the capacity to repeat the October 7 attacks in Israel, in which at least 1,200 people died, given the casualties and destruction suffered in the Israeli offensive in Gaza. . More than 35,000 Palestinians have died in the war, according to data from the Ministry of Health in the Strip, and the vast majority of buildings are destroyed.

This Sunday, Kirby qualified the president’s statements. “We are not saying that Hamas no longer has military capabilities. We have not said that they do not represent a viable threat to the Israeli people. Of course. But they no longer have the military capacity to do what they did on October 7.”

The spokesperson’s statements come a day after Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, maintained telephone contacts with his counterparts in Egypt and Qatar. The three countries issued a joint call this weekend to Hamas and Israel to accept the terms of the proposal.

“These principles bring together the demands of all parties in a way that responds to multiple interests and will provide immediate relief to both the long-suffering people of Gaza and the long-suffering hostages and their families. This agreement opens a roadmap for a permanent ceasefire and to end the crisis,” states the appeal released by the State Department.

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