PM’s office says Israel will dispatch negotiating team when location for talks is set

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office issues a statement attributed to a senior Israeli official who says that once a location for negotiations is determined, the premier will order the dispatch of an Israeli delegation to hold talks aimed at securing the release of all remaining hostages and at ending the war on Israel’s terms.

It’s not clear whether Netanyahu’s statement was coordinated with any of the Arab mediators who are currently waiting for Israel to respond to their phased hostage release proposal that Hamas accepted on Monday.

The mediators are hoping that Israel will accept the proposal to allow for the immediate commencement of negotiations in either Doha or Cairo in order to finalize the terms, such as the identities of the Palestinian security prisoners who will be released.

Netanyahu appears to instead be talking about a deal that will see the release of all 50 remaining hostages at once.

This is something that Hamas has long offered in exchange for an end to the war and an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.

But Netanyahu has argued that this exchange would leave Hamas in power with the ability to revive itself.

Instead, the cabinet approved earlier this month a series of terms for ending the war that effectively amount to Hamas’s complete surrender.

The conditions are the release of all remaining hostages at once, the disarmament of Hamas, the demilitarization of the Gaza Strip, overall Israeli security control of the Gaza Strip and the transfer of governance to a body that is not Hamas or the Palestinian Authority.

Hamas has already rejected calls to give up its weapons, and the IDF has estimated that the full dismantlement of Hamas’s terror infrastructure in Gaza will take years to complete, leading critics to accuse Netanyahu of seeking to prolong the war to stay in power.