President Joe Biden will deliver remarks on the situation in the Middle East later Friday as work continues to secure the release of hostages held by Hamas in exchange for a temporary ceasefire in the war in Gaza and as Israel says its forces have entered central Rafah, the city in southern Gaza that Biden has warned should not be the target of a major ground offensive.
Israel this week presented mediators with new ideas on the hostage and ceasefire talks, a diplomatic source familiar with the negotiations said on Tuesday, without expanding on what the new ideas were.
Indirect talks between Israel and Hamas on securing the hostages’ release were paused three weeks ago without a deal after the sides could not come to an agreement on some of the terms.
On Thursday, Hamas said it had informed mediators that they are “prepared to reach a comprehensive agreement” that includes a full hostage and prisoner exchange deal if Israel stops its war in Gaza.
A statement from the group said while it had shown “flexibility and positivity in dealing with the efforts of the mediators throughout all previous rounds of indirect negotiations.” Israel, Hamas said, had used the months of ongoing talks as a cover to continue its war in Gaza.
“Hamas and the Palestinian factions will not accept being part of this policy of continuous negotiations in the face of aggression, killing, siege, starvation, and genocide of our people,” the Hamas statement said.
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly insisted that the war must continue until Hamas is completely destroyed.
The president, who returned to the White House from his beach home in Delaware earlier in the morning, has avoided commenting on the situation in Israel for several days. He has not weighed in publicly on an Israeli strike in Rafah that resulted in the deaths of dozens of civilians.
The White House called images from the disaster “heartbreaking” but said the incident had not crossed Biden’s red line for withholding some US weapons shipments to Israel.
Biden will be speaking as negotiations continue to secure the release of hostages in exchange for a temporary ceasefire in the war between Israel and Hamas. Israel recently issued a new proposal to secure the hostages’ release.
The president told CNN’s Erin Burnett in an interview this month that he would limit some US arms to Israel if the country’s military “go into Rafah.”
But he has remained vague about how he will quantify such a decision, leading to frustrations and a degree of confusion over his stance. Many Democrats, along with foreign leaders who the US counts as allies, say Israel’s actions clearly cross a red line – if not Biden’s, then their own and those of international law.
White House officials have sought this week to explain Biden’s stance, suggesting his barometer for changing policy would be a “major ground invasion” of the city.
A major ground invasion, national security spokesman John Kirby has said, would be obvious should it begin: “Lots of units of tens of thousands of troops or thousands of troops moving in a coordinated set of maneuvers against a wide variety of targets on the ground in a massive way. That’s a major ground operation. Pretty simple.”
While the Middle East is the main foreign policy challenge occupying the president, domestic attention is focused on his predecessor Donald Trump being found guilty in the New York hush money case. It is not clear when and how Biden intends to directly address the verdict.
This story is breaking and will be updated.
