Report: US bridging proposal has been received by Sinwar; mediators seeking flexibility from PM

The updated US bridging proposal, endorsed by fellow mediators Qatar and Egypt and accepted by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu yesterday, has been received by Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, Channel 12 says in an unsourced report.

It says the Israeli assessment is that Sinwar will stick with Hamas’s current public position, which is to reject the proposal.

The report says the mediators have conveyed a message to Israel, urging Netanyahu to show flexibility so that they can make a final effort to get Hamas to the negotiating table.

The report does not definitely explain the discrepancies of the past two days, which saw Netanyahu announcing after his meeting with Blinken yesterday that he has accepted the bridging proposal, Blinken publicly confirming that Netanyahu has done so and demanding that Hamas do the same, while Netanyahu continues to insist on terms, including an IDF presence on the Gaza-Egypt border, that Egypt has reportedly ruled out, and amid reported requests from both the mediators and Israel’s own negotiators that Netanyahu show flexibility.

It notes that Netanyahu “sharpened the areas of differences” in his meeting earlier today with some families of hostages and of slain soldiers, when he reportedly insisted on some kind of ongoing IDF presence on the Philadelphi Corridor along the Gaza-Egypt border, an arrangement at the Netzarim Corridor to prevent the return of armed gunmen to northern Gaza, and the right to resume fighting until Hamas is destroyed.

Channel 12 broadcasts a sequence of brief clips of Netanyahu’s remarks at the meeting which imply, but do not fully show, that he set out some of those specific demands: “We took hold of the Philadelphi Corridor; we took hold of the Rafah border crossing…,” he says in one snippet. “We are making an effort to return the hostages…,” he says in another. “But the other issue is to retain our strategic security assets in the face of heavy pressure at home and abroad. And we are standing firm,” he says in the third.

The report asserts that Blinken and the US are determinedly displaying optimism about the prospects for a deal in part because of the current Democratic National Convention and also because the administration is anxious to avoid a descent into regional conflict ahead of the presidential elections.

Israel’s negotiators were optimistic on their return from the Thursday-Friday Doha summit, which Hamas did not attend, because, the report says, they had gotten the Americans on board with Netanyahu’s proposal. And they expected he would give them flexibility to advance the process.

Channel 12 repeats its previous reporting that the Israeli negotiators told Netanyahu after the Doha summit that there would be no deal if he did not show flexibility on the issue of the Philadelphi Corridor, and that he responded Israeli control of that border route is a strategic issue. Ultimately, the TV report says, Netanyahu made plain to the Israeli negotiators that if the choice is between an Israeli presence on the Philadelphi corridor and a deal, he prefers the former.

Nonetheless, the report adds, the negotiators will make further effort to find a compromise between Netanyahu and the mediators, perhaps by reducing the number of IDF positions on the Philadelphi Corridor to just one or two.

The negotiators will attend a planned summit session in Cairo on Thursday or Friday, it says, even though they are not sure there’s anything to go there for in terms of negotiating leeway.