As Israeli forces advance deeper into the southern Gaza city of Rafah, President Joe Biden declared Friday that Hamas had lost its ability to carry out a major terrorist attack on Israel and endorsed what he said was the latest Israeli offer of a cease-fire deal.
“It’s time for this war to end, for the day after to begin,” he said.
Biden laid out a three-phase deal that would begin with a six-week temporary pause in fighting, which he said would lead to a more permanent cessation of hostilities with Hamas.
The first phase would include a “full and complete cease-fire,” Biden said at the White House. That would mean the withdrawal of Israeli forces from all heavily populated areas of Gaza and the release of some hostages, including women, the elderly, the wounded and American citizens, in exchange for the release of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails.
In addition, Israel would allow more humanitarian assistance into Gaza and the return of Palestinian citizens to their homes and neighborhoods in all areas of Gaza, including in the north.
After the initial six-week pause in phase one, phase two would see Israeli forces withdrawing completely from Gaza, in exchange for the release of all remaining hostages held by Hamas, including male Israeli soldiers.
“I’ll be honest with you, there are a number of things to be negotiated to move from phase one to phase two,” Biden warned.
The president said that as long as negotiations continued, however, the cease-fire would hold, even if talks dragged out past the initial six weeks. He vowed that mediators from the United States, Egypt and Qatar would continue until all of the agreements were reached. And as long as Hamas lives up to its commitments, Biden said, the Israelis have agreed to turn the temporary pause into a cessation of hostilities “permanently.”
President Joe Biden delivers remarks on the Middle East, from the State Dining Room of the White House, May 31, 2024.
In the third and final phase, a “major reconstruction plan for Gaza would commence, and any final remains of hostages who've been killed will be returned to their families.”
While Biden described the plan as a “comprehensive new proposal” by Israel, except for the maintenance of a cease-fire while talks are ongoing, the plan does not appear to be fundamentally different from a past proposal that Hamas accepted and Israel rejected.
"Hamas considers positively” the contents of Biden's speech, the group said in a statement.
However, Israel appeared less enthusiastic. Soon after Biden’s speech, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office released a statement saying it had presented a proposal that would return hostages while enabling Israel to continue the war until “the destruction of Hamas' military and governing capabilities” was achieved.
While Biden envisioned the deal leading to a potential “historic” normalization agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia, many details are unclear.
They include the level of Israeli military presence in each phase, as well as who will govern postwar Gaza, said Gerald Feierstein, director of the Middle East Institute’s Arabian Peninsula Affairs Program.
“If there is a firm principle that Hamas itself will not be the governing authority in Gaza after Israeli withdrawal, if they're not going to provide security, then who is? What exactly is the nature of a follow-on Palestinian authority?” he said to VOA.
A woman walks next to a display in solidarity with hostages kidnapped during the deadly October 7 attack by the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas from Gaza, in Tel Aviv, Israel, May 31, 2024.
Rafah operation
Despite an order by the top United Nations court for Israel to halt its assault on Rafah, the Israel Defense Forces, or IDF, is moving further into the southern Gaza city.
The IDF is widening its invasion in the city after earlier this week seizing control of the Philadelphi Corridor, a strategic territory along Gaza’s border with Egypt.
The offensive has drastically cut off the flow of humanitarian aid, causing widespread hunger. According to estimates by the United Nations, close to a million people have left Rafah, most of whom had been displaced earlier in the war.
“Palestinian people have endured sheer hell in this war,” Biden said.
International calls for Biden to press Israel, a close U.S. ally, to halt its offensive have grown louder since Israel’s airstrike on Sunday killed at least 45 people in a tent encampment designated as a safe zone.
Independent media investigations identified remnants of the munitions used in the strike as parts of a GBU-39, an American-made 113 kg bomb with a net explosive payload of 17 kg that is intended to be more targeted and accurate.
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Biden pushes for cease-fire deal as Israel digs deeper into Rafah
"The GBU-39 small-diameter bomb is created to be precise, created to be low collateral damage, but there's still both a science and an art to employing these munitions,” said Wes Bryant, a former U.S. Air Force Special Operations targeting professional.
“You can't just drop a precision low-collateral-damage weapon in an area saturated with civilians and expect no civilian casualties,” he told VOA.
Israel called the strike a “tragic accident” and has promised an investigation. But global outrage over horrifying images of charred bodies and children burned alive has renewed pressure on Biden to follow through on his threat to suspend U.S. delivery of offensive weapons to Israel if it went into Rafah without credible protections for civilians.
FILE - Palestinians gather at the site of an Israeli strike on a camp for internally displaced people in Rafah on May 27, 2024. (Photo by Eyad BABA / AFP)
Administration officials said Israeli strikes on Rafah have not crossed Biden’s red line, which they defined as a “major ground operation” in Rafah.
Earlier in May, Biden halted a shipment of thousands of larger bombs — weighing almost a ton and a quarter ton — that have inflicted high civilian casualties in Gaza. Beyond that, Biden has seemed reluctant to wield much pressure on Israeli leaders to force a change in policy.
Since Hamas launched a terror attack October 7 on Israel, killing about 1,200 people and taking roughly 250 hostages, Israel has embarked on an offensive to eliminate Hamas from Gaza. In recent weeks, Israel says its forces have killed 30,000 people, the majority of them combatants. The Hamas-run Health Ministry in Gaza says 36,284 people have been killed, most of them women and children, but does not estimate how many of the dead were combatants.
Kim Lewis contributed to this report.