Middle East Crisis: Biden Endorses Israeli Road Map for a Cease-Fire in Gaza (2024)

‘It’s time for this war to end’ in Gaza, Biden says.

“This is truly a decisive moment,” Mr. Biden said. “Israel has made their proposal. Hamas says it wants a cease-fire. This deal is an opportunity to prove whether they really mean it.”

With that statement, Mr. Biden appeared to be revealing his true agenda: making public elements of the proposal in an effort to pressure both Hamas and Israel to break out of a monthslong deadlock that has resulted in the killing of thousands of Palestinians.

American officials have described Hamas’s leader, Yahya Sinwar, as interested only in his own survival and that of his family and inner circle, as they presumably operate from tunnels deep under southern Gaza. But officials have also said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has little incentive to move to a real cease-fire, because of the widespread belief in Israel that as soon as the surviving hostages are returned, and a last cease-fire begins, he will most likely lose his fragile hold on power.

Mr. Biden’s remarks came at a pivotal moment in his re-election campaign, a day after his rival, former President Donald J. Trump, was convicted of 34 felony charges. At the same time, he has been facing growing pressure at home over the bloodshed in Gaza, which has led to eruptions on college campuses and on the streets of American cities, and alienated many of his own supporters.

Mr. Biden described the three-phase Israeli plan as a “comprehensive new proposal” that amounted to a road map to an “enduring cease-fire.” But at several moments in the past few months, Mr. Netanyahu has directly contradicted Mr. Biden. And so far, Hamas has never accepted a comprehensive proposal, declaring in its public statements that fighting must end before major hostage releases or any agreement with Israel.

Hints of differences came almost as soon as Mr. Biden finished speaking. Following his speech, the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office said the Israeli government was “united in the desire to bring home our hostages as soon as possible.”

But it added that Mr. Netanyahu had stipulated to Israeli negotiators that they could not reach a deal that would end the war before all their goals were achieved, including the destruction of Hamas’s military and governing capacities in Gaza.

“The exact outline that Israel has offered — including the conditional progression from stage to stage — enables Israel to maintain that principle,” Mr. Netanyahu’s office said.

Hamas reacted positively to Mr. Biden’s speech in a statement on social media, saying that it was willing to deal “constructively” with any cease-fire proposal based on a permanent truce, the complete withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza, the return of displaced Palestinians to their homes and a “serious prisoner exchange.”

Many of the hard-liners in Mr. Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition did not immediately respond to Mr. Biden’s address because of the Jewish Sabbath, which began before his remarks. Mr. Netanyahu’s nationalist allies, like Itamar Ben-Gvir, the national security minister, have said they could leave the government if an agreement ended the war before Hamas’s complete destruction.

“I know there are those in Israel who will not agree with this plan and will call for the war to continue indefinitely,” Mr. Biden said, adding that some in Mr. Netanyahu’s government have made clear they want to “occupy Gaza.”

“They want to keep fighting for years, and the hostages are not a priority to them,” Mr. Biden said in what appeared to be a direct message to the far-right members of Mr. Netanyahu’s cabinet. “I’ve urged leadership of Israel to stand behind this deal.”

Mr. Biden has faced questions over how long he was willing to support Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, and particularly its most recent attacks in the southern Gaza city of Rafah. The bloodshed in Gaza has left more than 36,000 people dead.

Israel’s national security adviser said this week that he expected the war to continue through at least the end of the year.

Global pressure to scale down the military operation increased after the International Court of Justice, an arm of the United Nations, ruled last week that Israel must halt its military offensive in Rafah. The court, however, has no means of enforcing the order.

Friday’s remarks were Mr. Biden’s first public comments about the war since an Israeli strike and subsequent fire on Sunday killed at least 45 people, including children, and wounded 249 in an encampment for the displaced, according to Gazan health officials. A visual analysis by The New York Times found that Israel used U.S.-made bombs in the strike, forcing the White House to face difficult questions over American responsibility for rising death toll.

Mr. Biden said on Friday that he saw the “terrible images” from the deadly fire.

“The Palestinian people have endured sheer hell in this war,” Mr. Biden said after describing the pain of those whose relatives were “slaughtered by Hamas terrorists on Oct. 7” and the “anguish” of Israeli families waiting for hostages to be released.

Mr. Biden also said too many innocent people had been killed in Gaza, “including thousands of children,” and addressed the many Americans who are infuriated over the way his administration has handled the conflict.

“I know this is a subject on which people in this country feel deep passionate convictions,” Mr. Biden added. “So do I. This has been one of the hardest, most complicated problems in the world. There’s nothing easy about this.”

In describing the four-and-a-half page Israeli proposal, Mr. Biden said it would be broken into three phases. The first would begin with a roughly six-week cease-fire, the withdrawal of Israeli forces from populated areas of Gaza and a release of elderly and female hostages held by Hamas, in exchange for the release of hundreds of Palestinian detainees. Mr. Biden said there were still details that still needed to be negotiated to move on to the next phase — apparently including how many Palestinians would be released in return for each freed Israeli hostage.

In the second phase, as described by a senior administration official who briefed reporters after Mr. Biden spoke, all the remaining Israeli hostages would be released, including male soldiers. All hostilities would end, and, the official said, all Israeli forces would withdraw from Gaza. In the past, Mr. Netanyahu has publicly rejected a complete withdrawal, maintaining that would result in a resurgent Hamas, once again in control of the territory.

It is unclear, from the description given to reporters in the briefing, who would govern the territory, though in the past the United States has said that would most likely be the Palestinian Authority, which has struggled to run the West Bank.

In the third phase, the remains of hostages who have died would be exchanged, rubble cleared and a three- to five-year reconstruction period would begin, backed by the United States, Europe and international institutions. But that plan sounded almost aspirational, given the level of destruction and the near-famine conditions.

Mr. Biden, however, portrayed this road map as reasonable — if the terrorist group goes along. “As long as Hamas lives up to its commitments, a temporary cease-fire will become, in the words of the Israeli proposal, a cessation of hostilities permanently,” Mr. Biden said.

American officials said they believed that following the meeting in Paris last weekend between William J. Burns, the C.I.A. director, and David Barnea, the head of Israel’s Mossad spy agency, Israel made significant concessions on the hostage talks. Those included reducing the number of live hostages they required to be released in the early phase.

Still, a person briefed on the matter said the negotiations were “on pause” while Israel conducts its operation in Rafah.

Mr. Biden has also been involved in the hostage talks, even though he has not traveled for any of the negotiating sessions. Mr. Biden’s role, officials said, has been most notable in the pressure he has put on Mr. Netanyahu to continue to negotiate and reduce Israeli demands.

But on Friday, Mr. Biden was clearly focusing his pressure on Hamas, arguing that taking this offer was their best shot at ending the war and moving toward a cease-fire.

“Everybody who wants peace now must raise their voices,” Mr. Biden said, adding that the public should let Hamas leaders “know they should take this deal. Work to make it real, make it lasting and forge a better future out of the tragic terror attack and war.”

Aaron Boxerman contributed reporting from Jerusalem, and Julian E. Barnes from Washington.

— Zolan Kanno-Youngs and David E. Sanger Zolan Kanno-Youngs reported from Rehoboth Beach, Del., where President Biden will be spending the weekend. David E. Sanger reported from Washington.

Congressional leaders, divided over Gaza, invite the Israeli prime minister to address a joint session.

Speaker Mike Johnson had been pressing to issue the invitation for weeks, seeking to hug Mr. Netanyahu closer as some Democrats, particularly progressives, repudiate him and condemn his tactics in the war, which have caused tens of thousands of civilian casualties in Gaza and a humanitarian disaster for Palestinians.

Republicans have unequivocally backed Mr. Netanyahu’s policies, while Democrats, many of whom view his far-right government as an impediment to peace, have been deeply split over them. On Friday, Mr. Biden called for a permanent cease-fire and said, “It’s time for this war to end.”

Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, earlier this year called for Mr. Netanyahu to step down and for new elections. In response, Mr. Netanyahu assailed Mr. Schumer in a closed-door virtual speech to Senate Republicans. Mr. Schumer at the time had refused to allow Mr. Netanyahu to make a similar address to Senate Democrats, arguing that it was not helpful to Israel for the prime minister to address American lawmakers in a partisan fashion.

Even before the invitation went out on Friday afternoon, the prospect of Mr. Netanyahu’s visit to the Capitol had divided Democrats. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont said he would boycott a speech from the prime minister, and House progressives said they would plan some sort of gesture to register their opposition to Mr. Netanyahu’s government and to his presence at the Capitol.

Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi had said Mr. Schumer should not add his name to the invitation.

But on Friday, Mr. Schumer, along with Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the House Democratic leader, and Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, and Mr. Johnson, extended a bipartisan invitation for Mr. Netanyahu to address all of Congress at once in a formal joint meeting of both chambers.

“The existential challenges we face, including the growing partnership between Iran, Russia and China, threaten the security, peace and prosperity of our countries and of free people around the world,” the four leaders wrote in the letter. “To build on our enduring relationship and to highlight America’s solidarity with Israel, we invite you to share the Israeli government’s vision for defending democracy, combating terror and establishing a just and lasting peace in the region.”

The lack of a date was somewhat unusual for an invitation to a foreign leader.

Mr. Netanyahu last addressed Congress in 2015, during a more formal joint meeting in which he took the podium before members of the House and Senate to argue strenuously against the policies of President Barack Obama related to a nuclear agreement with Iran. At the time, 58 members of Congress boycotted the speech.

The latest invitation is part of a weekslong campaign that House Republicans have undertaken to spotlight Democratic divisions on Israel, while portraying their own party as stalwart friends of the Jewish state.

Progressive groups called the move disgraceful. In a statement, Eva Borgwardt, a spokeswoman for IfNotNow, a left-wing Jewish group that has protested the war, said all four congressional leaders “will forever be remembered as the leaders who invited the war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu to give a speech to Congress in the middle of Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza, days after he crossed President Biden’s red line on an invasion of Rafah.”

What we know about the latest Gaza cease-fire proposal.

First Phase

Both sides would observe a six-week cease-fire. Israel would withdraw from major population centers in Gaza, and a number of hostages would be released, including women, the elderly and the wounded. The hostages would be exchanged for the release of hundreds of Palestinian detainees. Aid would begin flowing into Gaza, working up to some 600 trucks a day. Hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinian civilians would also be allowed to return to their homes in northern Gaza. Most Palestinians fled the north following Israel’s mass evacuation order before the ground invasion began.

During the first phase, Israel and Hamas would continue to negotiate to reach a permanent cease-fire. If the talks take more than six weeks, the first phase of the truce will continue until they reach a deal, Mr. Biden said.

Second Phase

With a permanent cease-fire, Israel would withdraw completely from Gaza. All the remaining living Israeli hostages would be released, including male soldiers, and more Palestinian prisoners would be released in exchange.

It was also unclear who would govern the territory under the agreement. Hamas could use a cease-fire to reconstitute its rule in Gaza. In the past, the United States has said that the Palestinian Authority, which has struggled to run the West Bank, ought to be brought in to run Gaza. Israeli officials, including Mr. Netanyahu, have generally rejected either the Palestinian Authority or Hamas running Gaza.

Third Phase

Hamas would return the remains of hostages who had died. Rubble would be cleared and a three- to five-year reconstruction period would begin, backed by the United States, Europe and international institutions.

Israel’s push into central Rafah defies international pressure.

Commercially available satellite imagery taken by Planet Labs on Thursday also showed that the Israeli military had set up positions in parts of central Rafah, while military vehicles and tanks could be spotted as far as the outskirts of the Tel al-Sultan area in western Rafah.

Despite nearly eight months of fighting, Israel has yet to accomplish its stated goals of bringing home the roughly 125 hostages held in Gaza and toppling Hamas. Israeli officials have said that shutting down Hamas’s cross-border smuggling network and rooting out militants in Rafah would be key steps toward those goals.

Another recent focal point of the Israeli military campaign in Gaza has been Jabaliya in the north, where the military said it had conducted more than 200 airstrikes over weeks of intense fighting with Hamas militants. On Friday, Israeli forces withdrew, leaving widespread devastation in their wake, according to the military and Palestinian residents. The military said it was also still conducting some combat operations in central Gaza.

Military analysts have expressed skepticism that the offensive in Rafah will deal Hamas the decisive blow that Israel craves. But it has deepened the misery of ordinary Palestinians, who are still facing widespread hunger in the enclave. And since the offensive began, the amount of international aid reaching southern Gaza has declined, although there has been a slight uptick in the arrival of commercial goods.

Tzachi Hanegbi, the Israeli national security adviser, said on Wednesday that Israel’s military operations in Gaza would likely last through the end of the year. Mr. Hanegbi, a senior aide to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said in a radio interview that the fighting would continue for months more to “shore up the achievement” against Hamas.

More than one million Palestinians in Rafah, about half the territory’s total population, have fled the Israeli offensive over the past few weeks, according to the United Nations, many of them displaced for the second or third time in this conflict. Many had sought refuge there after Israel ordered a mass evacuation of northern Gaza in late October, swelling the city’s population to 1.4 million.

Israel has followed through with its offensive in Rafah despite concerns from close allies like the United States that any major military assault would place civilians in grave danger.

On Sunday, some of those fears appeared to be realized when at least 45 people were killed in an Israeli strike and subsequent fire, according to Gazan health officials. The Israeli military said the bombardment had precisely targeted two Hamas commanders, but unintentionally set off a blaze nearby where civilians were sheltering.

Daniel Hagari, the Israeli military spokesman, later said there were “no tents in the immediate vicinity” of the structure targeted by Israeli aircraft. But a visual analysis by The New York Times found that the munitions hit inside a camp where displaced people had taken refuge.

Shlomo Brom, a retired Israeli brigadier general, said on Friday that the offensive in Rafah would likely continue for weeks as Israeli forces destroyed tunnels in controlled demolitions and fought through parts of the city against remaining militants in an effort to “clean up” the area.

To prevent Hamas from rearming itself, Israeli forces would likely remain in the border zone near Egypt for the foreseeable future, said General Brom, who directed the military’s strategic planning division. Israeli officials, he said, have yet to move toward the only other feasible option — handing over security responsibility to a new administration.

Senior Israeli officials have expressed frustration with Mr. Netanyahu for not articulating a clear exit strategy for the war. Over the past few months, Israeli forces have repeatedly gone back to areas like Jabaliya — which they had conquered earlier in the war — to crack down on renewed Hamas insurgencies.

As long as Israel has no diplomatic endgame for Gaza, its forces will keep finding themselves bogged down in constant battles against Palestinian militants there, General Brom said.

“All kinds of operations will be launched, and they will all have military logic, but they won’t be part of any clear strategy,” General Brom said, adding that chipping away at the militant threat under an Israeli military regime in Gaza “could take years.”

Last week, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to rein in its ongoing military offensive in Rafah, warning of the risk of grave harm to civilians, although some of the judges wrote that Israel could still conduct some military operations there. The Israeli military pressed on with the operation despite that pressure, describing its Rafah campaign as limited and precise.

Much of eastern Rafah has been devastated since the offensive began in early May, particularly around the border crossing with Egypt, according to satellite photos from May 22. Israel captured the Rafah crossing in an overnight operation on May 7 that marked the beginning of their assault on the area.

The Rafah crossing has served as a vital conduit for getting humanitarian aid into Gaza amid widespread deprivation and hunger. It also served as the main gateway for sick and wounded Gaza residents to flee the fighting and receive urgent medical care.

Israeli officials say the portal was part of Hamas’s smuggling operations into the enclave, which has been subject to a crushing Israeli-Egyptian blockade since the Palestinian armed group seized control of Gaza in 2007.

The crossing has been shuttered since its capture by Israeli forces, and Israeli, Egyptian and Palestinian officials have been unable to reach a deal to resume operations there.

After U.S. pressure, Egypt began diverting some aid trucks to another crossing, the Israeli-controlled Kerem Shalom, this week in an attempt to alleviate a sharp decline in aid entering Gaza.

Christiaan Triebertcontributed reporting.

Palestinian residents returning to Jabaliya in northern Gaza find wide devastation.

He said he and his family walked along devastated roads for nearly an hour in the heat and saw that no vehicle could navigate streets blocked by piles of rubble from homes and shops that had been destroyed by the Israeli military.

As they walked, rescue workers passed, carrying the wounded and bodies of those killed on stretchers. Some bodies were found in the streets, others had been dug out and pulled from the rubble — already beginning to decompose, said Mr. Awais, a social media marketer.

“Even the ambulances can’t drive through them to transport the injured and martyrs,” he said of the streets in Jabaliya.

The Israeli military said on Friday that it had finished its offensive in eastern Jabaliya and withdrawn after recovering the bodies of seven hostages, killing hundreds of fighters and destroying several miles of an underground tunnel network.

Satellite imagery captured in late May by Planet Labs showed the scale of the destruction in one southern area of the town and the area near the market.

Some buildings had already been destroyed before the latest Israeli offensive in the area, according to imagery from April. But by late May, far more structures in those areas appeared flattened and almost all vegetation was razed.

Mr. Awais and his family are among the few residents who still have a place to return to. Their home was only partially damaged. On Friday, they began to clean out parts of collapsed walls, broken wood and glass and ruined furniture so that their home would be inhabitable again. But the family supermarket, which had to close in December as a result of Israel’s siege on Gaza, was entirely destroyed, he said.

“Rubble is everywhere,” he added.

On May 11, the Israeli military said it had renewed its offensive in Jabaliya because Hamas, the armed Palestinian group that led the Oct. 7 attack, was trying to rebuild its infrastructure and operations in the area. At the time, Hamas accused Israel of “escalating its aggression against civilians all across Gaza” and vowed to continue fighting.

Israel first invaded northern Gaza after weeks of carrying out an intense aerial assault on the enclave in the wake of the Oct. 7 attack. The military has launched numerous deadly attacks on Jabaliya. Having survived the assault during the early months of the war, many people in Jabaliya thought they were safe from another Israeli offensive.

“Residents returned with tears in their eyes,” said Hossam Shbat, a journalist in Gaza. “Everything that we see is just rubble and destruction and wreckage. And more massacres.”

He added, “Residents have returned to see what no one can imagine: the destruction of the businesses and infrastructure and the shelters that sheltered thousands of displaced people.”

Jabaliya is often referred to as a camp because it was established more than 70 years ago by Palestinian refugees who were expelled or forced to flee from their homes in present-day Israel during the creation of the state. They were never permitted to return to their homes, and Jabaliya grew into a community populated by the refugees and their descendants.

In a video Mr. Shbat recorded on Thursday, he shows the ruins of Jabaliya around him. Behind him, in the shell of one four-story building, fires still smoldered in the debris.

“We can’t describe it in words,” he said in an interview. “The occupying military intentionally destroyed all the essentials of life.”

Israel says its latest operation in Jabaliya is over, and other news.