Senior Netanyahu adviser on Biden’s Gaza truce offer: ‘It’s a deal we agreed to… not a good deal, but we dearly want the hostages released’

A senior adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is quoted as saying that there are “a lot of details to be worked out” in the latest hostage release and ceasefire deal presented by US President Joe Biden last night, but acknowledges that the proposal laid out by Biden is “a deal we agreed to.”

“There are a lot of details to be worked out and that includes there will not be a permanent ceasefire until all our objectives are met,” Ophir Falk tells the British Sunday Times.

He is also quoted as saying Biden’s address was “a political speech for whatever reasons.”

According to the report, Falk stressed that Israel was not rejecting the deal, which he characterized as “a deal we agreed to — it’s not a good deal but we dearly want the hostages released, all of them.”

But echoing an earlier statement by Netanyahu, the adviser added that Israel’s conditions to end the war in Gaza, sparked by Hamas’s October 7 massacre, “have not changed — the release of the hostages and the destruction of Hamas as a genocidal terrorist organization.”