As U.S. readies last cease-fire push, Netanyahu digs in on border demands

CAIRO - As he fights for his political survival, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s insistence on keeping troops on a narrow strip of land along the Gaza-Egypt border has become the main obstacle to a cease-fire and hostage release agreement with Hamas, according to current and former officials from mediating countries.

After many months of inconclusive talks, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris discussed with advisers on Monday how to move forward with a final “take it or leave it” proposal to present to Israel and Hamas, potentially as soon as this week.

For the families of Israeli hostages still hoping to bring their loved ones home alive - and for the more than 2 million Palestinians in Gaza grappling with displacement, hunger, disease and Israeli bombardment - the stakes have never been higher, and the outlook never bleaker.

The Washington Post spoke with nine current and former officials in countries involved in the talks, and they expressed mounting frustration over the lack of progress and deepening pessimism about the prospects for a deal. Most spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive and ongoing diplomacy.

The chief sticking point, officials agree, is Netanyahu’s demand that Israeli troops be allowed to stay in the Philadelphi Corridor, a buffer zone running along Gaza’s southern border with Egypt, which Israel captured in May. U.S. officials say they continue to seek commitments from Hamas on important aspects of the deal as well and fear that the militant group might still block an agreement, even if the border issue is resolved.

Netanyahu says remaining in the corridor is essential to prevent Hamas from smuggling weapons, a stance that is fueling tensions with Egypt - another key U.S. ally in the region - and increasingly vocal dissent from figures within Israel’s political and security establishment, who say the country must prioritize the return of its hostages. They downplay the significance of an Israeli presence in Philadelphi, describing the embattled prime minister’s demands as an effort to derail an agreement that could weaken him politically.

The prime minister’s office declined to comment on claims that his position on the border was now the main barrier to talks progressing.

In a news conference late Tuesday, Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot, opposition politicians who resigned from Netanyahu’s war cabinet in June, took direct aim at the prime minister.

“Netanyahu is focused on political survival, damaging relations with the U.S. while Iran edges closer to nuclear capability,” Gantz said. “The hostages must be brought back, even at a very high cost.”

On Saturday, Israeli forces retrieved the bodies of six hostages from a tunnel in southern Gaza. Israeli authorities said they had been executed by their captors in recent days as troops operated in the area, prompting an outpouring of grief and rage across Israel. At least four of the six were on the list to be released in the first stage of a proposed agreement that negotiators have been wrangling over all summer.

Ninety-seven hostages are still held in Gaza, according to the Israeli government; only 64 are believed to be alive. In a statement Monday night, Hamas’s military spokesman, known as Abu Obaida, gave an ominous warning about their fate: “Netanyahu’s insistence on releasing the prisoners through military pressure, instead of concluding a deal, will mean that they will return to their families in coffins, forcing their families to choose between receiving them dead or alive.”

As hostage families and their supporters took to the streets for massive anti-government demonstrations Monday, and thousands of mourners gathered to remember Israeli American Hersh Goldberg-Polin, whose body was among those recovered from Gaza, an Israeli official reached out to a Post reporter to vent his anger.

“Hamas murdered them, and Hamas is the villain here, but my government neglected them,” the official said of the hostages. “We could’ve saved them. Hamas committed the crime and should be held accountable, but my government had a responsibility to do whatever it takes to save them, and it failed them and their families. We owe them an apology.”

In a news conference Monday, Netanyahu asked the families of the dead for forgiveness, but he also doubled down on his position on the border.

Pointing to a projection of a neon-green map of the Gaza Strip overlaid with icons of missiles, money bags and masked men, Netanyahu said, “The Axis of Evil needs the Philadelphi Corridor, and for the same reason we must control the Philadelphi Corridor.”

The Israeli cabinet voted in favor of an ongoing military presence along the corridor on Thursday, over the objections of Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.

“The cabinet decision indicated that Netanyahu is not interested in bringing the hostages home,” said Ephraim Sneh, a former deputy defense minister and board member of Commanders for Israel’s Security. “There is no other interpretation.”

Diplomatic talks restarted on an optimistic note in late May, when Biden went public with what he described as an Israeli proposal. It called for a three-stage process that would see hostages exchanged for Palestinian prisoners during an initial, six-week cease-fire - intended to lead to a permanent end to the war, which has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, many of them civilians, and created one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.

In early July, under American pressure, Hamas dropped some of its hard-line demands, and Biden voiced confidence that a deal was near. But later that month, Israeli negotiators formally introduced new requirements, including that Israeli troops remain in the Philadelphi Corridor and at the Rafah border crossing with Egypt. Hamas has said repeatedly that’s a nonstarter, and efforts to find a compromise have proved elusive.

Netanyahu’s stance on the Philadelphi Corridor has also raised tensions with Egypt, which objects to any Israeli presence there and has warned that it violates the 1979 Camp David Accords, a landmark treaty that has preserved peace between the two countries for more than four decades.

In 2005, under a U.S.-brokered agreement, the Palestinian Authority - Hamas’s main rival - took over administration of the border area, under the watch of European Union monitors.

When Hamas seized power in Gaza in 2007, the Palestinian Authority was kicked out of the enclave, and Israel, aided by Egypt, imposed a blockade that severely restricted the movement of goods and people.

Since Oct. 7, Netanyahu has claimed that the corridor is a key conduit for the transfer of weapons and funds to Hamas militants in Gaza. Israel’s military says it has found about two dozen tunnels running under the border since May.

Cairo has reacted angrily to the accusations, saying it has destroyed more than 1,500 smuggling tunnels over the past decade and created a roughly three-mile-deep militarized buffer zone on its side of the border in northern Sinai.

Foreign journalists are not given independent access to Gaza or to Sinai, making it impossible to verify the competing claims.

Egypt has its own border security concerns, having quietly cooperated with Israel for years as it fought an Islamist insurgency that benefited from ties to Hamas. Any smuggling operation is “impossible,” Diaa Rashwan, the head of Egypt’s state information service, said in April. Netanyahu’s latest comments on the corridor were an attempt to “use Egypt’s name to distract Israeli public opinion and obstruct reaching a ceasefire deal,” the Egyptian Foreign Ministry said in a statement Tuesday.

When Israeli representatives visited Cairo two weeks ago, they spent a day-long meeting with Egyptian spy chief Abbas Kamel discussing only the Philadelphi Corridor, rather than specifics of the hostage-for-prisoner exchange, according to a former Egyptian official familiar with the talks.

At one point last month, Egyptian mediators refused to pass along Israel’s latest proposal to Hamas since they objected to the border provisions so strongly, the former official said. Egypt would be willing to entertain a phased Israeli withdrawal from the Philadelphi Corridor, he added, but “finally they have to withdraw.”

It is a position shared by Washington, which has been adamant that there can be no permanent Israeli occupation of Gaza.

In a rare public acknowledgment of differences with Israel, Biden told reporters at the White House on Monday that Netanyahu is not doing enough to get a deal. Last month, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the Israeli leader had agreed to the latest U.S. proposal, only for Netanyahu to publicly disavow key aspects of it hours later.

Pressed Tuesday for a U.S. response to Netanyahu’s latest remarks on the Philadelphi Corridor, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said, “I’m not going to get into a debate with the prime minister.”

Washington has refused to consider conditioning military aid to Israel, and with Biden in the waning months of his presidency and a possible second Trump term on the horizon, “Netanyahu is playing hardball,” according to a member of a diplomatic mission in the region.

Two senior administration officials said that if Israel and Hamas do not accept the “take it or leave it” deal, it could mark the end of American-led negotiations.

The greatest pressure on Netanyahu now comes from inside Israel, where military officials contend that his position on the border is driven by political, rather than security, considerations.

Gallant has argued that holding Philadelphi is not necessary from a military perspective and has said the Israel Defense Forces are ready to pay whatever operational price is required for the hostages’ freedom. Israeli military spokesman Daniel Hagari has said repeatedly that only a negotiated deal would bring most of them home.

Gershon Baskin, an Israeli peace activist who helped negotiate the release of kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit from Hamas captivity in 2011, said he got a green light from members of the Israeli hostage negotiating team to open a secret back channel with Hamas in May. He said he shared daily updates on his contacts with the official team.

“It lasted for all of two weeks before I was shut down,” he said. “Israel is trying to sell to the public that there are negotiations going on, but there are no real negotiations going on.”

Asked for comment on Baskin’s behind-the-scenes efforts, the prime minister’s office said that he “has not been, nor is, part of the official or indirect negotiations that Israel has been conducting since the events of October 7.”

Moti Kahana, an Israeli American businessman who runs the U.S. security firm GDC, said there are workable border alternatives but no Israeli political will to pursue them.

He noted that private security companies have been in discussion with U.S. and Israeli officials about plans to rehire former employees of the Palestinian Authority in Gaza to man the Rafah crossing.

“They can easily get a solution if they decide to make a decision,” Kahana said.

A senior U.S. official said a U.S.-trained Palestinian force is the most likely arrangement for securing the border. The European Union has said it is willing to reprise its role monitoring the Rafah crossing, in collaboration with the Palestinian Authority. Cairo would embrace an E.U. presence there, the former Egyptian official said.

“There are solutions to prevent arms smuggling by Hamas. It resides on agreements with the Americans, it resides on things we need the Egyptians to agree to,” said Eyal Hulata, former head of the Israeli National Security Council.

But members of negotiating team, who were given a limited mandate in the latest round of working-level talks in Doha last week, believe “that things are not moving their way,” Hulata said.

“If this was something Netanyahu would agree to, it would have happened.”