White House says hostage talks ongoing, Israeli team to fly to Cairo later this week

The White House insisted that negotiations for a Gaza hostage and ceasefire deal were still ongoing as the latest Israel team returned from Cairo Monday night for consultations before heading back to Egypt later in the week.

“There continues to be progress, and our team on the ground continues to describe the talks as constructive,” US National Security Communications Advisor John Kirby told reporters in a virtual meeting.

He made the comment in the aftermath of a high-level US level summit in Cairo on Sunday that failed to produce a significant breakthrough in attempts to finalize a deal that would secure the lease of the 109 hostages in Gaza and end the 10-month war in that enclave.

A high-level Israeli team led by the Mossad and Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) chiefs – David Barnea and Ronen Bar, respectively – with Maj.-Gen. (Res.) Alon Nitzan was in Cairo on Sunday, followed by a lower-level working group on Monday.

That group is made up of officials from the Mossad, the Shin Bet and the IDF left Cairo on Monday for consultations and to update their superiors in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

The working team is “expected to return [to Cairo] later in the week for negotiations to advance a deal to return the hostages,” a source said.

Kirby rejected reports that hostage talks had broken down, given the absence of any tangible sign of success after Sunday’s high-level summit that had been led by CIA Director William Burns with the help of US special envoy Brett McGurk.

“There was no breakdown,” McGurk said, adding that enough progress had been made that the top mediators had felt working groups representing all the parties could continue discussions this week. He added that this included Hamas.

“The next logical step was to have working groups at lower levels sit down to hammer out these finer details,” Kirby said.

Among the issues that are being fleshed out, he said, are details regarding the exchange of hostages for the release of Palestinian security prisoners in Israeli jails.

KAN reported that the US has sought to advance the deal by focusing on details where common ground could be found while avoiding issues of disagreement such as the Philadelphi Corridor.

The Prime Minister’s Office on Monday rejected media reports that Israel had agreed to reduce its forces in the Philadelphi Corridor in order to finalize the Gaza hostage deal.

The Israeli team has maintained that the IDF must remain in Philadelphi

“Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu stands by the principle that Israel will physically remain in the Philadelphi Corridor, from the Kerem Shalom [crossing] to the sea,” it said on Monday.

Hamas has insisted that Israel must withdraw from that corridor in the first part of the three-phase deal US President Joe Biden first unveiled on May 31.

According to the Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar mediators have sought “minor adjustments” to the July 2 version of the deal that Hamas agreed to, which would include a gradual reduction of IDF forces in the critical buffer zone between Egypt and Gaza, known as the Philadelphi Corridor.

There would be no construction in that corridor during the first phase of the agreement, according to Al-Akhbar, and there would be no changes to the status quo in that corridor.

The security road by the border barrier, however, would be paved to allow the IDF forces on the ground to move more easily in that area.

Phase one of the deal is expected to last for 42 days.

In exchange for a Hamas agreement to this amendment, Al-Akhbar said, Israel would be flexible on issues relating to the return of Palestinians to northern Gaza. Israel has insisted that no Palestinian terrorists should be allowed to return to that region of Gaza.

Israel’s Ambassador to the US Mike Herzog told CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday Israel is “not obliged to leave the Philadelphi Corridor at this phase.”

But, he said, “we are reducing our forces there.”

In talking of the three-phase deal, he said that much of the conversation has been about the implementation of phase one of the deal.

“We had constructive talks in Egypt a few days ago. We are well-coordinated with the US administration,” he said.

In addition to issues relating to the Philadelphi Corridor, Herzog said there was a focus on ensuring that as many live hostages as possible would be released in phase one of the deal. It’s expected that anywhere from 18 to 33 would be freed at that stage.

“In phase one, we hope to get as many live hostages out as possible….  Every day that passes endangers their lives,” Herzog said.

Speaking at a news conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia, US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said Washington was still “feverishly” working in Cairo to get a ceasefire and a hostage deal.

Mediators put forward a number of alternatives to the presence of Israeli forces on the Philadelphi Corridor and the Netzarim Corridor, which cuts across the middle of the Gaza Strip, but none were accepted by the parties, Egyptian sources said.

Israel also expressed reservations about several of the Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails that Hamas is demanding the release of, and Israel demanded their exit from Gaza if they are released, the sources added.

There has been much back and forth between the teams from Israel, the United States, and Egypt since Thursday to narrow the remaining gaps, the senior US official said, in preparation for Saturday when Qatar and Egypt met with senior representatives of Hamas to walk through the proposal in detail.

Egypt and Qatar have been the main mediators for the deal with the support of the United States.

Hamas said Israel has backtracked on a commitment to withdraw troops from the Corridor and put forward other new conditions, including the screening of displaced Palestinians as they return to the enclave’s more heavily populated north when the ceasefire begins.

“We will not accept discussions about retractions from what we agreed to on July 2 or new conditions,” Hamas official Osama Hamdan told the group’s Al-Aqsa TV on Sunday.

Reuters contributed to this report.