Hamas’s murder of six hostages, including U.S. citizen Hersh Goldberg-Polin, makes a ceasefire-for-hostages deal more urgent, the White House said Tuesday.
John Kirby, the White House national security communications advisor, told reporters that Hamas leaders will pay for their crimes, as negotiations with the terror group continue through Egyptian and Qatari mediators.
“I think what happened over the weekend should serve as a reminder to everyone how evil Hamas is and how deadly, how lethal the situation is for all those hostages,” Kirby said. “It should underscore for everybody—and I think it does in Israel, I think it does in the region, it certainly does here, inside the administration and in the United States—how important it is to get this deal in place.”
“I’d be lying to you if I said that the work going on yesterday, today, tomorrow and the days ahead are not going to be informed or shaped, colored, by our own grief and sorrow and shock and outrage about what Hamas did,” he added.
One of the points of dispute in achieving a deal for the remaining hostages Hamas still holds is future Israeli control over the Philadelphi Corridor, the Israeli military’s name for the Gaza-Egypt border.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Monday that Israel needs to retain a security presence along the border. “This corridor determines our entire future,” he said. “It’s the oxygen of Hamas.”
Kirby said on Tuesday that he is not going to argue with Netanyahu’s point but that the latest proposal, to which the Israeli prime minister had agreed, included a withdrawal of Israeli forces from all densely-populated areas of Gaza.
“That includes those areas along that corridor,” Kirby said. “That’s the proposal that Israel had agreed to.”
In August, a senior administration official described the terms, which the Biden administration put forward and to which Netanyahu agreed, as a “final bridging proposal.”
Kirby declined to use that terminology on Tuesday but said the gaps to achieve a deal remain narrow. “I’m not using that phrase,” Kirby said.
“I’ve seen some press reporting out there about ‘take it or leave it’ and ‘final proposal,’ and ‘text this’ and ‘text that,’” he said. “All I’m telling you is our team is still working on trying to get this to closure.”
