(AFP) – US President Joe Biden on Monday said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was not doing enough to secure a deal for the release of hostages taken by Palestinian armed group Hamas. Asked by reporters at the White House—where Biden was arriving for a meeting with US negotiators—if he thought the Israeli leader was doing enough on the issue, the president responded: “No.”
Biden’s meeting with the negotiators on the hostage-release deal comes after the deaths on Saturday of six captives in Gaza, including an American citizen. “President Biden expressed his devastation and outrage at the murder, and reaffirmed the importance of holding Hamas’s leaders accountable,” a White House statement said after the meeting.
Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris—who is running to succeed him in November’s US presidential election—were briefed by negotiators “on the status of the bridging proposal outlined by the United States, Qatar, and Egypt,” the statement said. Ahead of the meeting, Biden had said negotiators were “very close” to a final proposal to be presented to Israel and Hamas.
Vice President Harris said the killing of the six hostages was “a brutal, barbaric act by Hamas terrorists.” “Hamas leaders will pay for these crimes. It is long past time for a ceasefire and hostage deal. We need to bring the hostages home and end the suffering in Gaza,” she said in a post on X, formerly Twitter. The White House said the briefing had been attended by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, CIA Director William Burns, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, and other senior US officials.
The United States, along with fellow mediators Egypt and Qatar, has spent months pushing for a hostage-prisoner exchange and ceasefire in the war in Gaza. Militants seized 251 hostages during the October 7 attack on Israel that sparked the war, 97 of whom remain in Gaza, including 33 the Israeli military says are dead. Scores of hostages were released during a one-week truce in November.
An Israeli court on Monday ordered a halt to a strike called by the country’s largest union aimed at ramping up pressure on Netanyahu’s government to secure the release of the remaining captives. Hostage relatives and advocates have accused Netanyahu’s administration of not doing enough to bring the captives back alive and have called for an immediate ceasefire.
In addition to the taking of hostages, Hamas’s October 7 attack resulted in the deaths of 1,205 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli official figures. More than 40,786 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s military campaign in the Gaza Strip since the war began, according to the health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza. Most of the dead are women and children, according to the UN’s human rights office.
© 2024 AFP
