A senior Biden administration official who spoke on background with reporters on Wednesday after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed a joint session of Congress denied that Netanyahu is holding up a deal that would include a ceasefire and release of hostages.
Talks with Hamas are “in the closing stages” and are “reaching the point that we believe a deal is closeable,” the senior official said. “It’s time to move to close that agreement.”
The senior official spoke briefly and then fielded questions from journalists the day before U.S. President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris—the presumptive 2024 Democratic nominee for president—are slated to meet, separately, with Netanyahu.
The meetings at the White House—the first to which Netanyahu has been invited since he was re-elected in November 2022—will address Israel’s defense, including broader integration in the Middle East, developments in the Gaza Strip and the regional humanitarian situation, according to the senior official.
“The framework of a deal is basically there,” the senior U.S. official said about negotiations with Hamas. “We’re working out the implementation.”
The senior official noted that there are “some very serious implementation issues that still have to be resolved” that the Biden administration didn’t “want to discount the difficulty of.”
“There are some things we need from Hamas, and there are some things we need from the Israeli side,” the senior official said.
There have been breakthroughs lately on Hamas’s previously “completely unacceptable” demands, with the phasing of the deal coming into greater focus and consensus, per the senior official.
‘The pieces are coming together’
The implementation of a potential agreement is progressing but not yet finalized.
“We worked out a pretty detailed text of the arrangements of how a hostage exchange would actually work, including with significant benefits for Gazans and humanitarian permissions,” the senior official said.
The details of the implementation are part of “a pretty intense negotiation. It’s actually ongoing,” according to the senior official. “We think the pieces are coming together, and it’s time to kind of move to close this out.”
The senior official would not put a timeframe on reaching a deal, but said “given that we have the lives of hostages on the line, there’s really no time to lose.”
Asked by a reporter if there is any indication that Netanyahu is holding up the deal, particularly after the U.S. president announced that he isn’t seeking re-election, the senior Biden administration official said that is not the case.
“If we draw that conclusion, we’ll say it very clearly. Right now, there has been progress and the implementation issues are real. You can’t do a deal until they’re kind of worked out,” the senior official said.
“If I’m talking to you a month from now, and we’re still kind of where we are now, I might draw a different conclusion,” added the senior official.
Because Hamas leaders are spread out—in Doha, Turkey and underground in Gaza—“it’s anything but a normal negotiation,” according to the official. “But there has been progress because the Israelis have put an awful lot on the table.”
A reporter asked the senior official about Netanyahu’s claim in his address to the joint session of Congress that, contrary to assessments of some human rights organizations and others, Israel isn’t preventing entry of food into Gaza.
The senior official said that the Biden administration shares the perspective of the Israeli premier.
“We do not see the Israelis blocking the entry of provisions into Gaza. We have some issues of distribution that our folks are working through all the time,” said the senior official, noting that armed gangs siphon off aid. “It’s a very difficult wartime environment.”